Neil Hanlon
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shrug.pw
Neil Hanlon
@shrug.pw
(he/him)

Founder, Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation
Infrastructure Lead @rockylinux.org

Need infra help? https://shrugpw.com

Hosting without drama? https://shrug.host

https://ko-fi.me/kneel | http://qrz.com/db/n1han

opinions mine
Pinned
if the pay range for your "SRE III" role at a bank with $3.7T AUM is $65,000 (about a 50% variance), and the other train is approaching at 75 kilometers per mm^2 from the east....

why does no one want to work anymore?
triscuits are just savory shredded wheat you don't put milk on
February 11, 2026 at 2:44 AM
Reposted by Neil Hanlon
February 10, 2026 at 3:08 PM
Pro tip: Use GitHub for software development so you too can spend time reviewing a change for a client and then have GitHub lose all your pending comments because they don't know how to use computers.
February 9, 2026 at 10:10 PM
ffs azure is such a piece of shit platform
February 5, 2026 at 9:31 PM
February 5, 2026 at 3:11 PM
FOSDEM! And we were next to the Fedora & CentOS folks :)
February 2, 2026 at 7:39 PM
Sup
February 1, 2026 at 2:35 PM
January 25, 2026 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Neil Hanlon
Fosdem '26 is around the corner and the greatest thing is that we (the rockylinux community, heh) will be there, so come visit us, rumour says we have extra fun swag to give away this year to our dear visitors!
See you in Brussels! fosdem.org/2026/
January 16, 2026 at 9:36 PM
Hired goons (bootlickers): www.hunterprotective.com
Hunter Protective Services | Security Firm | Burlington, MA
New England’s Fastest Growing Contract Security Firm
www.hunterprotective.com
January 14, 2026 at 5:39 PM
There were no villains in the official telling, only inevitabilities. No choices, only outcomes. No lies, only narratives that worked better than the truth ever had.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
The public was encouraged to move on, which it did, not out of forgiveness but fatigue.

And so the worst of times persisted, not as an emergency but as infrastructure--quietly funded, carefully messaged, and broadly accepted.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
Over time, disbelief gave way to routine. Sirens blended into traffic noise. Footage scrolled past between ads. Each new event briefly shocked, then settled into the sediment of the previous ones, forming a layered archive no one was responsible for maintaining.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
To remember clearly was to risk being labeled emotional. To ask questions was to misunderstand how complex things had become.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
Language became the preferred instrument. People were no longer killed; incidents occurred. Bullets did not strike bodies; situations escalated.

The dead were not dead but subjects of ongoing investigations, and the living were reminded that speculation would only make things worse.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
protocols observed, and outcomes reviewed by committees whose conclusions were always forthcoming and never arrived.

Justice, we were told, was not absent--it was merely delayed, indefinitely, for reasons of stability.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
Authority no longer bothered to argue that nothing was happening. It simply insisted that whatever was happening was complicated, unfortunate, and best left to professionals.

Press conferences arrived on schedule, solemn and immaculate, to assure us that procedures had been followed,
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
to conclusions about what we had already seen. The streets were full of witnesses and the air was full of explanations for why none of them should be trusted. Evidence accumulated faster than accountability, which is to say: endlessly.
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, and calling it anything else was considered a civic duty.

Truth still existed, technically, but it had been reclassified as a nuisance--something to be managed, contextualized, and buried beneath statements reminding us not to jump
January 11, 2026 at 5:10 PM
if only wishing made it true
January 5, 2026 at 8:37 PM
2026 is the year of LLMs achieving limited intelligence.

...just kidding, they still think it’s 2024.
January 5, 2026 at 6:22 PM
Reposted by Neil Hanlon
2025 recapped
December 29, 2025 at 5:46 PM
modern prep isn't bunkers, it's acknowledging your phone isn't a backup plan and the grid takes unscheduled naps

i don't do doomsday theater, but extended multi-service outages aren't hypothetical--they're overdue
December 29, 2025 at 5:45 PM
infrastructure is a shared hallucination that occasionally stops hallucinating. plan accordingly.

I helped bedford cert update emergency prep guidance because the most recent fiber cut proved we're optimized for normal, and normal is temporary at best

article: thebedfordcitizen.org/2025/12/bedf...
Bedford CERT Team Reminds Residents to Check Emergency Kits - The Bedford Citizen
Items that people need to handle emergencies have changed over time.
thebedfordcitizen.org
December 29, 2025 at 5:45 PM
AI "training" is a misleading term and should be retired.

These models aren’t learning, understanding, or getting smarter. They’re optimizing loss functions via curve fitting in a high-dimensional space.

Stop anthropomorphizing statistics. It’s getting embarrassing.
December 25, 2025 at 5:21 AM