There are still Luddites on Earth, which is good news! Unfortunately, they have no power, and the overcomplexification of everything is going to continue. But yesterday I was stunned to find in The Reg a testimonial that Luddites still exist, and one of them still has a job at Red Hat! For having written this, I absolve Liam Proven of all his sins (because I copiously criticized him in the past, here or in comments on The Reg): Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it’s all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter.

As usual, the comments are also relevant. Let me summarize the whole thing.

The Big Beautiful Bullshit List:

  1. Containers
  2. Kubernetes
  3. The “Cloud”
  4. Anything at all “as a Service” (SaaS)
  5. The Blockchain – anything, everything, based on it
  6. Arguably the biggest and worst of all, “generative AI”

Additions from the readers:

  1. The Internet of things (IoT)
  2. The whole DevOps thing

Other candidates: Jira, Agile, SCRUM, microservices, Serverless, Data lakes, Web3, Metaverse (defunct), Event-driven everything, Zero trust, Edge computing, Ajax, 2FA, Node.js & Electron.

Also: mandatory HTTPS on everything (even if not needed); “works best with Chrome” (formerly “works best with IE4/IE5/IE6”): deploy early and rely on the end users to do your beta testing; household appliances that are being hooked up to the Internet.

They forgot a few things: Wayland, tiling window managers with automatic tiling, immutability, snaps…

But, of course, the real SCAM is actually Microsoft.