Yep. As a Gen Xer with a teenage son, when I hear my peers freaking out about our kids and technology, I remind them what our parents said about MTV.

This was the most informative thing I read on the internet today. I can’t wait to go start a blog.

This is awesome and there is gonna be so much fraud! All the fraud.

If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…

The Fediverse is Already Dead

Eh… This take is one grumpy dude in a hacker space somewhere soap boxing.

We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.

We have

• Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
• Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
• Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”

As a security professional, what finally got me to move from Apache to NGINX was OpenResty.

I sometimes still put Apache behind it, depending on my goals.

This exact thing happened to one of my clients. And it sucked because they didn’t even register the domains with Ionos, they registered them with some other company that then got bought by Ionos. They were not technically savvy and didn’t understand what was happening until it was way too late. They lost about 8 domains closely associated with their business and with their CEO’s research.

I talk to people there everyday. Taiwan doesn’t WANT to be a province of China and anyone who thinks it should be is a dick (and probably a sock puppet for the Chinese Communist Party - it’s gonna be pretty hard to keep doing your job here without looking just like one of those). End of discussion.

It’d be akin to China funding and arming an independence movement in Texas.

No, it would be akin to China funding and arming the US if England decided to say “Hey, you used to be English! We think you still are. We plan to come over there and replace your government. Also, we’re murdering our own citizens if they strongly disagree with this policy.”

Are you gonna deny that? It’s a SUPER bad look.

I don’t disagree.

But that doesn’t change anything I said. The US does not have a monopoly on assholery.

I work closely with people in Taiwan and China is DEFINITELY the asshole in the situation. Like a big bad “You need to get punched in the face until you stop assholing” asshole. The nuance is almost all manufactured, like Twinkies and Fox News outrage. Like for real, super seriously. Like how Russia is the asshole in the Ukraine and how Israel is the asshole in well… Israel.

While the US govt. has selfish economic and ideological reasons for supporting Taiwan, it is ONE thing I’m in favor of it doing. I don’t like bullies. No one should like bullies.

Yes. When we refuse to trade with assholes, we lose opportunities to profit off of said assholes.

Some capitalist assholes who don’t care if the people they’re profiting off are assholes don’t like being told not to do business with said other assholes, so ALL the assholes whine about it, but from my perspective the thing to remember is they’re all a bunch of assholes.

Phrasing it the way the headline does puts a very particular spin on things, don’t you think?

RHEL --> Debian in the sense that RHEL is a root distro from which the others spring. But there the similarities very much end.

You’re kind of an asshole for like completely no reason aren’t you? That’s now what this conversation is about. By all means, continue.

Sure, that was overly broad. But I’ve got a BUNCH of tools in my garage and they’re fine, but my dad’s got a bunch of the same tools in his workshop he had when I was a kid, and they still work just as well now as they did in the 80s (I think his drill press actually used to belong to HIS dad and it’s never failed me). Also, his table saw and band saw rock. I remember using them to cut things for silly projects when I was a kid and I just used the table saw the other day… same saw, great results.

My take was all centered around “solid” and “built to last”. I don’t have any faith that the tools in my garage will outlast his tools. Don’t see it happening. I think me inheriting his tools is more likely than my tools outlasting them.

• Facebook.
• OKCupid.
• Reddit
• Netflix
• Amazon Prime Video
• iTunes
• Twitter
• Patreon
• Everything Adobe
• Google Voice
• YouTube
• Most search engines

ALSO

• MySQL
• Redis

ALSO

• Wordpress

ALSO

• Vacuum cleaners
• Refrigerators
• Every power tool ever
• Most cars
• Airplanes (looking at you Boing)

ALSO

• Apple products

ALSO

• The fricken Artemis Program vs. the Apollo Program. (I consult with the space industry a lot, so this makes me feel things)

Thank you. But I don’t do it anymore. I could not earn enough money to have a stable life and family.

I have a whole different rant about that.

It’s not going to collapse over night. Instead, things are going to get worse and worse gradually, with each step backward becoming the new normal.

Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we’ll all just carry on until one day we’re like just chilling in our debris city, hoping we don’t have to sell any teeth for bottle caps in order to buy food today when some ghoul comes storming in and shoots up the place trying to murder a harmless old man with a dog, and then some naive vault dweller tries to intervene, but she only makes the problem worse and we’ll all wonder how the hell we got here.

Are you trying to say “Well the US sucks, so… don’t… don’t criticize Russia… man…”

Or are you trying to say “States gonna be states and do shitty state things.”