Generic white guy SysAdmin

@westbynoreaster

#HPC #SysAdmin & aspiring #DevOps headed to Charlotte in the new year. #dHTC evangelist, and labor history nerd. #BLM! Opinions my own. he/him

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Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jun 6

I finally got around to reading this, via my uni library access, and 😵 is this man high on his own supply. He scoffs at business consultants & their playbooks & two paragraphs latter floats his own rule-of-3 McKinsey-esque vaporware solution. 🙄 What a vapid farce.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jun 4

And then we get this alongside it from a UPenn business school professor. Puts pep in my step this morning that IT sysadmins across the country are giving “AI” pushers the #BigSad.

Phone screenshot of the start of an Economist article by Wharton Business school professor Ethan Millicent titled “The IT department, where AI goes to die.” Which if the folks who best understand the impact of software on your business want this shit to DIE a quiet and ignominious death, maybe that should be telling you something important.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jun 4

Seeing anti-AI sticker on the phone has nothing at ALL to do with this particular section being sponsored by one of the foremost slop peddlers. 🤔 Nope, just a coincidence.

Screenshot from a phone showing the Economists header for the section entitled “The new socialists, how dangerous are they?”. Right below said title is “Insider is supported by Anthropic”, one of the major players in the generative LLM chatbot bubble. One of the stickers on the back of the iPhone is a the letters AI with a red line through it. Which feels a little on the nose.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· May 18

From the Claude Consumer Terms of Service <https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms> It's a Stochastic Text Extruding "Machine" (ht @emilymbender.bsky.social for the fantastic term). It has no concept of truth or validity. The companies admit as much in their ToS.

Reliance on Outputs and Actions. Artificial intelligence and large language models are frontier technologies that are still improving in accuracy, reliability and safety. When you use our Services, you acknowledge and agree:

1. Outputs may not always be accurate and may contain material inaccuracies even if they appear accurate because of their level of detail or specificity.
2. Actions may not be error free or operate as you intended.
3. You should not rely on any Outputs or Actions without independently confirming their accuracy.
4. The Services and any Outputs may not reflect correct, current, or complete information.
5. Outputs may contain content that is inconsistent with Anthropic’s views.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Mar 27

Baked Potato skins are the Tuber Offal and ‘90s White Folks were very much “YES PLEASE!” 🎩 tip to my wife for the ☝🏻

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

So WTF is an impairment? 🤬

Page 16 of the 2024/25 University of Nottingham financial statement. Here are the important bits to understand what an Impairment is and how its value has impacted the quoted deficit values.

"In the year work has progressed on the development of our estates aster plan. As part of this work, it has been recognised that we need to reduce the size of our estate, whilst improving the quality of some of our facilities to further enhance our teaching and research excellence. In preparation for reducing the University’s footprint, a number of building valuations have been carried out that show that the net book value of some of our buildings is overstated. The value of these buildings, including Castle Meadow Campus and King’s Meadow Campus have been impaired and written down in these financial statements. The total impairment reported is £74.8m (2024: £nil) and has been included in the Statement of Comprehensive Income in impairment and write off of tangible fixed assets."

It's a explicit financial statement that certain assets were overvalued on the books and taking a write off. It goes into the expenditure column in your financial statement. But you don't owe anyone that many millions of pounds or spent that much more money. Its that it needs to be recorded in the financial statement this way, for reasons I don't exactly get. Speak to your local CFO to get an explanation.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

So why the massive listed deficit Matt? Let's look at page 34 & 46 of the most recent years annual fiscal statement: www.nottingham.ac.uk/fabs/finance...

1. Please ignore the "movement of USS pension liability". It's an standard practice accounting thing. It's annoying AF when upper management uses Total Annual Surplus/Deficit as either a "YAY go us!" or "OH NO we must fire staff".
2. Excluding the pension liability, Nottingham would have run a £22m (2.6%) deficit in 2023/24. This years deficit is 9.9% of income, which is a seriously big number.
3. The BULK of that £85.3m deficit comes from "Impairment and write of tangible fixed assets" to the tune of £74.8m.
4. If it wasn't for the write off, Nottingham would still be running a deficit but at 1.2% of total income. Not great but definitely not catastrophic.

Page 46 of the 2024/25 financial statement is on the cost, depreciate, & whatnot of tangible fixed assets like buildings though other things too. And there are the impairments...

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

Let's talk about student fees... Student fee income did grow by 3% between 2023/24 and 2024/25 at Nottingham but a few years of stagnant growth given the brutal inflation in the years prior won't make up the difference.

A scatter plot using the 2023/24 data comparing how much of a Uni's income comes from student fees to how much of the student fee income comes from Home Students. Nottingham is in the middle of the pack on both metrics. Half their income comes from student fees and like 55% of fee income is from home students. This means that any decline in students, particular internationals due to Labour continuing the Tory immigration policies will hurt universities. Allowing tuition fees to rise for home students does help but does not offset the dramatic decline in international students in all but the most prestigious institutions.

This has a horrid effect that as the international pool shrinks, those that do come will more and more be concentrated at prestigious and already wealthy institutions. And those lower down the ladder need to make up that loss with home students, pulling them from other regional universities who rely more on those domestic undergraduates. Rob Peter to pay Paul. Piss flows down hill and all that I guess.

Another scatter plot this time comparing Net Cash flow from Ops to the percentage of income from student fees. Basically, if you rely more on students for your income, are you worse off? And in the bulk, not really. There are institutions financially struggling up and down the "student fee percentage of income" scale.

All that indicates is that the factors causing financial hardship across the sector are multifaceted. Anyone giving you simple answers is either intentionally ignorant or lying to you.

Nottingham saw since 2016/17 average growth of tuition income through to 2021/22 DESPITE a fixed (not inflation adjusted) fee level. This means letting in more students, particularly internationals to make up for the Gove cuts that started in 2012. But they had no growth in tuition income for 22/23 & 23/24 at the peak of the Ukraine / "post-pandemic" inflation spike. This is going to put any institution in a hole. They took in more money, in part due to Labour letting the home student tuition level rise in their first year in government, but that again, that won't make up the difference already lost. Also that flatline is right at the heel turn of the Tory government away from UKHE as a market export to actively trying to destroy it with government immigration policy. Partly to leave the shitpile of problems for the next Labour goverment to deal with.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

The thing management often likes to trot out is that salary costs are TOO HIGH! You can find the pay-scales for the different job levels for Nottingham here: www.nottingham.ac.uk/hr/guidesand... Your average lecturer is NOT making £100k+.

Focusing on Nottingham, one has seen the average salary rise faster than the sector average in the last few years, and with the bullet point from the THE article about the jump in over 100k positions from 2024 to 2025, definitely something to this. BUT its not immediately obvious why? We would need to break down that block between
- teaching staff at the medical school
- senior tenured faculty
- upper level management
and then ask whether either pay rises or additional hiring in those high pay cohorts is sensible given the long standing budgetary issues.

Focusing again on Nottingham, it makes sense that with the increase in the average salary of the past few years, you would see an increase in the total proportion of annual income going to staff costs (salary + benefits) particularly as all institutions have been struggling with keeping income rising. But that's the thing, that line goes up if either income falls (non-exclusive) or costs rise.

Checking out staff costs as a percentage of annual expenditures, which is a bit more under the control of the university and takes out the ups and down of income, the Nottingham staff costs is a little flatter. Still above average for the sector but there are places that are FAR worse. Basically hovering between 54% and 57% which is a main UCEA cartel cost target.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

Let's check how much borrowing & capital expenditure the University has been doing, as these have been the culprits at other institutions like Brighton or Sussex. AND... it's not profligate spending, at least from comparing across financial statements in the sector.

A swarm plot over the same timeframe as the other figures 2016/17 to 2023/24, this time showing what percentage of the Total Annual Expenditures goes to capital costs. NOTE: capital costs cover a LOT of things, not just new buildings to fluff the ego of your Vice Chancellor. Prior to 2020 Nottingham had a greater than average bit of expenditure, but for most of the past decade it has been below 10%, which itself as around or below the average for the sector. At a certain level, not spending enough on Capital Costs means you aren't repairing buildings or doing essential upgrades, which itself degrades the services & education an institution can provide. But looking at this, at least in recently there isn't any OMG so much unnecessary spending.

A swarm plot for UK higher ed from 2016/17 to 2023/24 for the amount of external borrowing relative to total income. Both the overall sector distributions AND university of Nottingham remain quite consistent over the 8 years. Nottingham's debt load is between 10% & 20%, far lower than most of the sector, which given its issues with cash flow makes sense. They aren't trying to serve an enormous debt load like other institutions relative to their income.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 28

All the figures that follow use the latest year in the #HESA set (23/24) but I figure the 24/25 statement is similar. Nottingham is in a real hole. It kinda climbed out over Covid years but definitely has fallen back in.

Plot of the UK Higher Education institutions for 2023/24 comparing the Net cash flow from operating activities (X) vs the Total annual surplus (Y). The collection of dots has a blobby positive correlation. The University of Nottingham sadly finds itself in the bottom left quadrant with a total annual deficit of 3.5% or so and a barely above zero % net cash flow from Ops. There are institutions worse off, but its not where one wants to be in either measure. So we can be comfortable saying this financial problem is REAL.

A time series dot scatter plot (one dot per institution per year) of the "Net liquidity days" for each UKHE institution from 2016/17 to 2023/24. There is a wide range of scatter amongst institutions both among just the Russell Group and the rest. University of Nottingham has for those seven years been near the bottom in the fiscal measure ratio of (cash + investments) to (operating expenditure - depreciation). The green line that is Nottingham in this figure show it near zero for the first few years, rising just about the "sensible lower bound" of 60 days between 2020 and 2022 and then falling again. I don't have the "liquidity days" derived but given listed liquidity dropped to £59.2m in the last fiscal year, I expect it has gotten worse.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 26

Over at #TheBadPlace it’s pretty easy to just go and ask him, not that the little shit is trustworthy or seemingly has any self-reflective capabilities.

Thread on twitter between myself and Advait Palawan:

Me: Why did you take down the “Einstein” chatbot?

AP: Cease and Desist

Me: Really? Presumably from Canvas/Instructure, right?

AP: Due to the name Einstein

Me: Wow 😮 Like the Family Foundation or something? Damn dude.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 26

Seems like an accurate summary of his columns, at least to me.

Fake Allister Heath Sunday Telegraph column title heading: “the chilling reality of the continued existence of the Tory party proves the Tories were right all along.”

And then a sad little circle of his face below the headline with his name at “The Telegraph” as if we had forgotten what we were reading.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 20

Yes, I am petty. @ucu.org.uk members, please do not give any #SWP member elected power in the union. They do not have the best interests of the broad membership at the heart of their mission. Their tenure controlling #NEC has been a string of public failures. NO to ANY #UCULeft candidates.

Sean Wallis, UCL faculty, answering the question of whether he is a member of the cultish (my words) Socialist Workers Party for nearly 40 years.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 18

Please let it be written in the same font as this. 🙏🏻 Though text in some anarchistic inspired scribble font would be an acceptable alternative.

Socialist Worker, the official publication of the Socialist Workers Party (Crackpot cultish Trotskyites). White sans-serif block lettering on a red background. The first i in Socialist has a red start with a white border instead of the dot.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 17

I use *rhetoric* as a descriptor intentionally, both as it feels like an accurate description and also that I expect any grey-beard engineering prof would bristle at such an accusation. Maybe a more appropriate identifier would be *marketing*, as the subsequent paragraph makes clear.

The first paragraph of the second section of the blogspot/paper, proports to lay out the unvarnished apolitical & uncontrovertible economic & technical reality that makes they policy proscription not only inarguable but necessary.

"Each high-performance computing transition has been driven by a combination of market forces and semiconductor economics, requiring the scientific computing community to develop and embrace new algorithms and software to use the systems effectively. Each time, there were those who initially resisted inevitability, only to suffer the consequences of delayed adoption, whether clinging to vector supercomputers or refusing to embrace scalable message passing. Today is no different. The scientific computing community must again adapt and embrace the new realities of our AI-dominated technology world."

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 17

I honestly could not get past the literal use of the term *maxim*, because it is such an odd choice from (emerita) EECS professors. Why use a word that conjures in readers folk aphorisms and the pronouncements of 19th century political philosophers?

The final paragraph in the introduction section of the blogpost/paper:

"In this paper, we outline seven new maxims that define the present and the future of advanced scientific computing. From these new maxims, we conclude with a proposal for a “moon shot” to build a new foundation for future computer systems for research, one that would benefit both scientific computing and AI.."

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 4

The “I need to test how well the cukes are absorbing the brine, they might need more salt or vinegar, just one more to make sure” restorative #pickle. That’s in the recipe! 😇 I don’t make the rules.

A large glass jar of freshly made Dill & Garlic Half-Sour-ish pickles. Beyond the bright green cucumbers, slices of red online, garlic and parsley can be seen in the salt & vinegar brine. The jar has a metal wire hinge and a glass top with a thin white rubber seal. It is sitting on a somewhat messy white countertop. I wish I had pickles…

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jan 31

With probably close to a foot of snow in the Charlotte metro (I think), it is NOW proper winter. This means that highs must never be above freezing until at least March. All further precip must be snow. ❄️ These are the rules!

Looking down an unplowed parking lot of a Charlotte apartment complex. 6” of fresh snow on the ground and more coming down.

Time to clean off the car before it piles up too much. Ground level shot of the apartment parking lot with snow.

Looking out my 3rd floor apartment window at a collection of snow covered cars.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jan 23

Is anyone else having issues seeing videos in posts (on here) that lack explicit URLs? It's occurring on the desktop version of @firefox.com 147.0.1 via Flatpak. Not seeing the issue on iphone mobile version. @support.bsky.team

A snapshot of a load error for a video in a bluesky post, black text on a white background that reads "An error occured while loading the video. Please try again." And then a black Retry button underneath that text.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jan 12

What was your most recent enjoyable purchase at a stationary shop? My desire was to draw straight lines at various angles to each other accurately without having to do mental trigonometry.

A package of clear plastic rulers, right angle triangles and a compass from the drafting tool company Staeder. It’s still in its packaging, so as to keep everything together til I get a proper pencil case.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Nov 13

This shit is coming to Charlotte, NC starting this weekend it seems.

First page of a letter from Mecklenburg Counth Sheriff’s office regarding the arrival of CBP personnel in the city starting as early as Saturday, Nov 15th 2025. The Chief states that MCSO has not had any requests that they participate in any action and promises to pass along further information when it’s available.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jul 19

On flight from #CLT to #CMH at the start of my #PEARC25 journey. Doing some light pre-meeting reading while in route. 😇✊🏻

Red Book cover with Black & Yellow lettering of
"Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology" by the late David Golumbia.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jun 19

Literally THE NEXT COMIC October 9th, two-thousand and ONE. 20 years of that shit and we knew from the jump. www.mnftiu.cc/2001/10/09/w...

First Panel (Guy 1 looking right on a corded phone):
Oh my God, this War On Terrorism is gonna rule! I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!

Second Panel (Guy 2 looking left on a corded phone):
I know! Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War on Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore? It'll be just like that!

Third Panel (Guy 1 looking right on a corded phone):
Right! God, if only that War On Drugs hadn't been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana right now!

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jun 15

Also still grinding my way through this beast of a PhD thesis project turned monograph. And always keeping our current era of #Gleichschaltung in mind as I go.

The title page of a late 60s era academic monograph

Fritz K. Ringer
The Decline of the German Mandarins
The German Academic Community, 1890-1933
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· May 3

Inspired by the @inbedwiththeright.bsky.social month by month slog through #Project1933, I have Fritz Ringer's PhD thesis on "German (academic) Mandarins". But is there anything more recently published on this topic? 🤔 Gotta be *some* new incites in the last 55 years.

Title page of a 50+ year old monograph

- Fritz Ringer
- The Decline of the German Mandarins: the German Academic Community, 1890-1933
- Harvard University Press, Boston, Massachusetts
- 1969

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Apr 19

My pasty sunburnt self is enjoying fried chicken, rice & beans, and cabbage for lunch in far North Charlotte. For all the folks being food foolish, particularly @ southern US cooking, just NO. Also, 1960s/70s white folk food fads existed. There are so many more deserving targets.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Feb 11

The true protectors of American universities have arrived.

A Canada goose roosting at the corner of a brick and concrete building looking out across campus. Tolerating the humans below.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jan 22

Second day of work after an unexpected dusting of snow here in Charlotte.

A photo of a laptop somewhat precariously perched on a pine wood end table in my apartment bedroom. The bright winter afternoon sun shines through as an adjacent apartment building is visible through the blinds.

Generic white guy SysAdmin@westbynoreaster· Jan 21

First day at the new job! ✊🏻 Not felt cold like this since leaving Helsinki in 2021.