Just Type sudo and See What Happens
Learning Linux, surviving AI panic, and why Congress should not regulate technology it thinks runs on Wi-Fi.
Oh my gosh, YOU GUYS. AI is going to destroy the future.
Also, if you don’t learn it, you’ll be living under a freeway overpass, eating canned ravioli heated on a catalytic converter. Also, if you do learn it, congratulations! Now, you’ve joined the robot uprising and will soon be personally responsible for the collapse of civilization.
Choose your toxin.
It’s a comforting set of options, really. Either you are obsolete, or you are morally compromised. The middle ground (learning something new like a normal adult) has received far less media attention.
The day I returned to the world of geeks
In February of 2019, I took a phone call while visiting a sibling in Washington state.
After that call, I did two things I had not been planning on:
I quit my freelance writing gig.
I went sledding in the Pacific Northwest.
Both decisions felt equally responsible.
The freelance gig ended because I had a new one: working as a contractor for OpenVPN on their marketing team. Once I started, my new boss, the marketing manager, began introducing me to people on Slack calls with great enthusiasm and an admirable commitment to narrative momentum:
“She even set up her own OpenVPN server at home.”
This was thrilling news to me, because I hadn’t.
But she said it quickly, confidently, and loudly, which turns out to be the three qualities that make correcting someone socially impossible. My chances of interrupting were lower than a perimenopausal pelvic floor.
(Ew. Who says that?)
Later, I clarified that my “home VPN server” was actually the OpenVPN feature already built into my router. All I did was configure it and add DDNS so it could find my ever-changing IP address. In networking terms, this is roughly equivalent to saying you “built a car” when you actually adjusted the seat.
But still.
Technically accurate is the best kind of accurate.
My first assignment
My first assignments were challenging. Don’t want to start off with anything boring.
Write quick-start guides explaining how to launch OpenVPN servers on different Linux operating systems.
This immediately raised an important question for me: Linux has multiple operating systems?
I had always assumed Linux was the operating system.
Oh, sweet summer child.
So there I was in my late thirties, discovering that the tech world had an entire ecosystem I had never touched. I mean, I knew Linux existed. I had worked in IT for a decade. But in corporate IT, you can live your whole life inside a technical silo and never see what’s running on the monitors over the cubicle wall. I spoke fluent SQL. Network servers, however, might as well have been Swahili.
Naturally, I did what any responsible adult would do. I took an old desktop computer, swapped the hard drive for an SSD, installed Ubuntu, and started poking at it like a raccoon opening a cooler.
(It helps that this job is fully remote, so all of this poking around was in the privacy of my wee little home office.)
If you didn’t previously know that Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, you just learned something today. See? You can learn new things. Even after the age when society quietly begins suggesting that you should already know everything.
The cult of sudo
This was also when I learned the magical command:
sudo
I used it constantly, but didn’t know its etymology. I mean, I knew what it DID. I knew I used it to have all the rights and privileges necessary for my command to run, come hell or high water.
But why use “sudo”? I had no clue why those four letters gave me power.
I even mentioned “sudo” in a talk at church. Turns out, when you SAY IT over the pulpit, people don’t know you’re talking about “sudo.” They think you’re talking about “pseudo.” This meant that my jokes landed spectacularly well for reasons I did not intend.
Eventually, I learned that “sudo” stands for SuperUser DO.
Which is Linux developer humor. (I’m looking at you Torvalds.) And if you’ve ever met Linux developers, you will recognize this as exactly the kind of joke they would make and then leave in production forever.
The point of this story
I learned Linux in my late thirties. Not because I was brilliant, but because my job required it, and panic is an excellent educational motivator.
Since then, I’ve learned networking, structured authoring, component content systems, firewalls for DigitalOcean droplets, and the dark emotional arts of technical documentation.
Which brings us to today.
AI has entered the chat
If you put AI and something terrifying in the same headline, you immediately qualify to write for a media outlet.
“AI Will Destroy Jobs.”
“AI Will Replace Humanity.”
“AI Will Turn Your Refrigerator Into A Surveillance State.”
This is particularly fascinating given that, at this moment in history, we have actual military leaders telling troops that Trumpelstiltskin is anointed by Jesus to trigger Armageddon through war with Iran.
So yes.
The robots are definitely the biggest problem.
The congressional tech support desk
Remember when Congress grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew?
Representative Richard Hudson asked the devastating question:
“Does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network?”
The entire internet paused because that question is roughly equivalent to asking:
“Does my toaster access the electricity?”
These are the people currently responsible for regulating advanced technology.
Good luck to all of us.
Fear of things we don’t understand
The pattern is ancient: People fear what they don’t understand, and people who don’t understand technology are now loudly explaining why it must be banned, regulated, or exorcised.
Which brings me to the part of this article where I gently suggest something radical.
You could…
learn it.
The right mental model
Security researcher Daniel Miessler explains something important:
Most chatbots are AI.
But not all AI is chatbots.
Which means when most people say “AI,” they’re talking about GenAI.
ChatGPT.
Claude.
Perplexity.
Image generators.
Video generators.
Those are tools.
But AI can be something else entirely: a process.
My workflow
Here’s a simplified version of part of my job.
A product manager tells me about a new feature.
I need to:
understand it
explain it clearly
update existing documentation
decide where it belongs
get review from engineers
publish it
Simple.
Except that our documentation site contains thousands of pages.
Recently, I inherited documentation for another product. Total pages? About 2,500. That is, apparently, a perfectly reasonable number of pages to casually hand someone and say:
“You own this now.”
Sure. Let me just read those real quick.
My AI process
That brings me to today. I spent some time building something. Turns out I spent excessive amounts of time on it. More time than a husband spends in the bathroom when he gets home from work. I spent the entire day, basically. It didn’t go smoothly. Tech projects rarely do.
Here’s the scoop on what I did:
I created an MCP server that indexes the documentation pages I maintain and connected it directly to Claude, allowing me to query our documentation like a database.
So I asked it:
“Here’s a new feature description from the developers.
Find every documentation page referencing this feature.
Tell me which pages need updating.”
It returned a prioritized list. In minutes. Manually, that would have been… not minutes. Possibly weeks. Possibly a mild nervous breakdown.
The next step is validating the results with product managers. But if it checks out?
Mischief managed.
The Ethical Technologist weighs in
AI isn’t magic. It’s not Skynet. It’s not your replacement. It’s a tool that becomes powerful when you integrate it into processes humans already understand.
It requires people who know how systems work, ask good questions, and recognize when the machine is confidently hallucinating nonsense. Those are the people who should be involved in shaping policy. Not the ones asking whether TikTok can see their Wi-Fi.
And so, from the benches of Bountiful, Utah, comes today’s modest prophetic message:
You’re not too stupid to learn AI.
You’re not too old.
You’re not too late.
You are simply at the stage of the journey where the terminal window looks like ancient wizard text, and you are typing sudo with quiet hope.
But trust me.
Eventually, the wizardry starts making sense.
And when it does—
It feels like sledding downhill in the Pacific Northwest. Cold. Fast. Slightly terrifying. And wildly fun.