Posts by sedregj 267 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Oct 2023
If you put all your eggs into someone else's basket and pay them to look after them but don't have any useful SLAs in place then you get what you pay for.
You are using git so you should have a local copy of your code. You do use git as it was intended ... don't you?
If you insist on using github, simply crack open the relevant section of your DR plan and use it whilst github is down and then return to normal when it is back up.
No idea what the problem is here!
"salt water environment"
Cruise ships (for example) generally have a large number of computers on board and in my experience you generally don't notice the salt at all. There are even open air swimming pools 15 odd decks up on these beasts. A modern cruise ship can be of the order of 200,000 tonnes or even more. I've been on a P&O beast that was 180,000t and the usual Atlantic swell of 5 metres was mostly unnoticeable. Even whizzing across the Bay of Biscay with a swell that would dwarf my house only sent a few people off for some sea sick pills.
However, the seas are able to destroy the biggest ships if fortune decides so. There are "rogue waves" and other phenomena that laugh at our paltry efforts to master nature.
It is not beyond the whit of man (think drilling rigs too) to deal with salt water corrosion.
"make it align with Apple UI guidelines"
Have you tried to print something on an apple phone?
I've been doing IT for roughly 45 years and have dealt with some strange interfaces. Back in the day a GUI had a strip of menus with drop downs and you could generally find the function within a few seconds. My C64 ... blah blah etc
Nowadays we have far more sophisticated stuff: You get a horizontal strip of stuff, which might have a second level. You might have a series of three dots or lines at top right that might do something. How about an avatar ... with a menu or a whole new screen of screens of options (tabbed, naturally)
So you press a rectangle like icon and .... etc etc and then press the word Print - yes the Apple effort is just as shite as everyone elses's wankery. Its inconsistent and unintuitive. Why on earth is a trillion cow pat company unable to deliver a consistent and intuitive interface for something as simple as printing?
"MSSQL is used by many companies"
... who are frantically dumping it as fast as possible.
MSSQL and Oracle are only indicated by those with vested interests I still have to manage several of both but I'm not exactly enthused by either and thankful that someone else pays the piper. I'm hoping they bugger off stage right and I can relax and purge quite a lot of my brain's capacity.
Simply use those gigantic profits from flogging Copilot to subsidize everything else.
Surely the whopping investments in LLMs and Copilot are reaping rewards way beyond the fantastical dreams of avarice attributed to Creosote (according to Sir Terrence P)?
Note that trying to take a naturally decentralized system (git) and centralizing it (github) comes with costs. It turns out those costs will be horrendous.
I don't have much VMware left at customer sites anymore. I was such a fanboi in the past. I'm now fully in the Proxmox camp.
When anyone starts to whitter on the "Enterprise" line, do remind them that an ESXi box, when rebooted will not bother to take care of its VMs by default. It might as a stand alone, if you configure autostart/stop. If its a HA cluster member and you don't have DRS enabled then they will crash n restart on another node unless you use maint mode. Its all a bit of a pain and why should you?
A Proxmox box will always stop VMs first and then shutdown/reboot. A HA node will politely hand off its VMs and reboot. All of that is free/libre/gratis - that's a DRS and Storage DRS licence for free in VMware terms.
How about a normal Enterprise thing: monitoring. Try and monitor timesync/ntp on a VMware box using normal tools.
... anyway, I can't be arsed anymore with VMware. Its not what I signed up for anymore and it certainly is not something I would ever recommend to anyone. I watched it scam off Linux back in the day to now - the original ESX was a Redhat box and ESXi is a poorly disguised effort. I'm sure the code is clean but the intent is not.
PVE is a Debian Linux box with knobs on. Their HA clusters are superb - they do it properly and don't pander to nonsense like: "I want a two node cluster". The problem with that is that two is two - "I'm right and you are wrong"
The ESBA and WSBAs are both part of the UK as in just as UK as Somerset or Perthshire. Then you witter on about "the Cypriots". Cyprus itself is a game of at least seven halves: Greek and Turkish, south and north oh and the UK. ... and the rest of the shady factions that skulk around.
In the middle of Nicosia there is (or used to be) a statue to the great (Greek) Cypriot nationalist "Grivas". He is or was shown throwing a hand grenade ... into a bus full of women and kids. Well, you draw your own conclusions on all that stuff. My mum did rather a lot of investigations into it all whilst we were stationed in Cyprus in the mid eighties. Surprisingly not, its all a bit of a nasty muddle. EOKA seem to have been nearly as unpleasant to the locals as they were to the UK.
Anyway, Mr Furious .. fuck off. Its unlikely you have any idea what you are on about.
OK it works for you and you have it correctly configured by the sound if it.
However the things that connect to it are probably not air gapped or immune from the baddies. Once one of those gets into contact with your pariah box, the game is likely over. Your Win 2003 box will have absolutely no AV or any other protection more impressive than speaking a variety of SMB that everyone else has largely deprecated. It will be able to talk NetBEUI with a dodgy accent but that's no use these days.
Mind you I do have a customer with a very expensive machine that has a DOS 6 controller and I put a Samba daemon with all the controls switched off on one side and turning the machine share into a SMB 3.12 share.
Anyway, I'm sure you'll be fine.
Fortinets allow you to restrict logins to the webby console from particular IPs, which even a Draytek will do too. They have MFA available and cloudy keys too.
They are generally rather expensive devices and you do have to hate yourself and security to get it wrong or not give a shit (which is most likely). They are not particularly "opinionated" about admin access security but not too bad. I suggest they get opinionated.
They are not the most intuitive efforts either so if you get one going, you will have probably read some docs and so I suggest you have few excuses. If you can get an inbound NAT working to an internal service then you have read some docs. On the other hand they are very odd (but not as odd as a Watchguard) so perhaps we can allow that the usual closed source wankery, trying to differentiate your offering is causing the usual snags. Obviously Fortis are quite happy to run on a Linux kernel whilst being downright weird (they look more like FreeBSD at the commandline). The riff with Juniper and Dell OS9 here ...
If you are pwned due to not bothering with things like decent passwords or MFA then soz, lol.
I actually run a company and have staff etc to do that but I suggest you contact HMRC's advice line/bot to see what is possible.
Ask it/them whether you can claim for your own time doing your own accounts. To make this possibly work, you will need to do the work out of your regular employment hours. I suggest you could allocate say two hours per week on the weekend. Set a reasonable rate for the work: at least minimum wage but not excessive. You are probably not an accountant so charging yourself at an accountant's rate would be daft and considered excessive. £20ph seems a good start. Make sure you do actually stick to doing the work at the stipulated time or at least you are "in work" at that time - so your laptop should be running and logged in even if for a couple of weeks you are watching iPlayer!
The work is recording expenses/transactions, maintaining records and preparing data and recording it for online taxation requirements imposed by HMRC. That's a start - you'll come up with something better.
The above assumes that you do self assessment and that the flat £1000 expenses a year thing is not suitable for you. It might be best to hire an accountant instead but bear in mind you can only claim back the taxed portion of their fees.
eg You earn £10,000 over the untaxed allowance - that £10,000 will be taxed at 20% (1) ie £2,000. You hire an accountant who charges you £1,000 and saves you £500.
So the tax you pay is: (10,000 - 1000) x 20% = £1,800. The accountant saved you £500 by being an expert so it looks like a bargain: you paid £200 less to HMRC because you hired an accountant. You saved £500 via their advice. So that's a saving of £700 - lovely!
However, you paid the accountant £1,000, so you are £700 up and £1000 down = £300 down.
I've made a few assumptions here but a few minutes with a spreadsheet and a close reading of (1) will soon find where the point of hiring an accountant kicks in and how much you will want to pay for them.
(1) https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-and-thresholds-for-employers-2025-to-2026
"The software is a legitimate business expense."
There are two ways of doing expenses: You can simply say "its £1000" no questions asked and move on; or you record all expenses, keep receipts etc. Depending on your circumstances the £1000 can be a great choice because it requires no record keeping and time spent faffing with paperwork.
That £1000 is now going to be about £800 unless the rules for expenses change.
"The team recruited people with prior lucid-dreaming experience because they are better able to control dream content and search for insight while asleep"
Well, that's complete and utter bollocks for starters.
We (probably all organisms more complicated than an amoeba and perhaps even so) all dream in some way - I think that is a given. As to what is a human "lucid-dreamer", let alone why they are able to "control dream content" whatever that means is open to some interpretation.
"Even without lucidity, one dreamer asked a dream character for help solving the puzzle we were cueing,"
The team are taking drugs.
Steve S is a seriously clever bloke. I only know this because I have an AD domain with a kerberos over https KDC lying around doing its thing after finding a blog post he made. I think he is a mostly software geezer but he is a proper nerd and obviously he insisted on diving in on the hardware side by putting his tongue across 5.5V PD. I'm sure we have all done that at some time.
I doubt that anyone here has not looked at a 9V cell - the ones with both terminals on top, and thought ... hmm I wonder what happens when I touch my tongue to those metal things.
You probably don't do enterprise IT and neither does MS (but they are learning, gradually)
You need the likes of sysmon for system profiling and clearly MS have finally noticed that their shoddy MVP called Endpoint Management is a bit lack-lustre and are finally adding it in.
This is nothing to do with screenshots and that. It is all to do with being able to winkle out nasties.
Not to mention your arse! You feel acceleration through your entire body. There is a good reason for the phrase "flying by the seat of your pants" - it still works for ground vehicles.
Although your eyes only scan a small area at a time they do it quickly and you can move your head. At night, when you are going to be nearly blinded by an on coming vehicle's headlights, you know to drop your gaze and watch the edge of the road.
You mention your inner ear, so that's acceleration again. However you should be using the rest of your ears too. I often look left and listen right when turning right (in the UK, I do wind down the window). I use my ears to get a vague idea what is going on and then use my eyes for the final go/no go.
"according to analyst biz Gartner."
Who can stuff it up their arse. 1% of GDP on LLMs? Nope. You can have a Navy or a load of gas guzzling data centres stuffed full of hardware that hallucinates!
If Gartner is all that is left to pathetically beg people to subscribe then the bubble's burst is soon upon us.
"teach kid to place card within range of a video camera"
Putting a floppy into a drive is a simple tactile process, with a satisfying feedback (*clunk*, whirr etc) that is easy to understand and so is the eject mechanism. The labels are easy to follow.
QR codes are a confusing mess, if you don't know what they mean and you have to use just hand/eye co-ord. and aim an invisible "eye" at it. I suspect the child will aim the eye at the picture, which is the obvious thing to do. You'll really need to turn the camera into a proper handheld scanner to have any real chance of getting that to work. You could put the QR code as an overlay on the picture but it will look pretty rubbish.
The floppy disc effort is a fabulous solution and is also generally more accessible than scanning a QR code. For starters, it will work for a huge range of dexterity abilities and will easily lend itself to braille and working well for the blind.
One of my customer's machines (a bridge mill, I think its called) boots DOS 6.2.
I have a Samba daemon acting as a go between, so that Win 11 can even see its input data share. It's NetBIOS on one side and SMB 3.2 on the other. I had to turn off a couple of safety catches in Samba but it is doable and it can fix up filenames and case on the fly.
"If only they'd just added a couple more bytes to the address and left it with room to add more as needed."
Oh do show me how your new protocol will fit within upper layers. Bear in mind your new addressing scheme will need to fit in an ethernet frame and other frames.
Now tell me about processing efficiency: how are you aligning your addresses and other data to make the best use of registers and the rest? How will this work within existing hardware?
It isn't quite that easy as adding a little bit more bigger numbers.
"The problem isn't the lack of compute, it's the lack of science. We just don't know how to build an AGI."
Very true but that does not win arguments in the muggle world that will insist on "well just nerd harder". This argument demonstrates how the current efforts will never achieve AGI because laws of physics, no matter how much cash you throw at it.
Trump might want to restore basic science funding to give the nerd harder thing a chance.
Let's drop the AI moniker (divisive and bollocks) and look at "LLMs" instead.
Please bear with me because I'm going to whitter on as an engineer and I think you are more humanities focused.
I use them as a tool, just as I do a hack saw or a slide rule (I have two) or some of my "make it smaller, deeper or more broken" devices: percussion tools - fencing maul, sledge hammer, lump hammer ... you get the idea.
I bought a second hand Nvidia A2000 with 16GB of RAM and popped it into a box at work (Dell server) that generally acts as a fancy NAS for customer backups over night, so its bored during the day.
With llama.cpp I can run a small LLM - 20B parameters or so locally. It is quite surprising how much general knowledge even a small model can have. I'm actually interested mainly in programming but I do get them to do english to latin and vv or eng to german and vv. I've also asked it to explain physics ("tell me about the bernouiilllii equations" - with deliberate mucking about with spelling) and get a reasonable answer. Questions about small towns in Somerset get reasonable but rather generic answers.
Bear in mind this is in a dataset that is around 16GB in size or around three DVDs - ie a pretty big encyclopedia that works quite fast and can sort of reason too.
ChatGPT, Claude and co have much bigger data sets and their models run to something like 100s of billions and even trillions. They also have a lot of other machinery tacked on too. At that scale of data, you might question the quality and even the provenance of the data inputs. Let's put it this way - they ain't 100% encyclopedia Britannica. That said, neither am I.
So, you can rail against the machine or not. Your last para did rather anthropomorphisise (how the blazes does anyone spell Greeklish correctly!) the beasties. For me they are a handy tool but they do need some care to use effectively.
My first car was a Ford Fiesta MK 1 (UK). It was tiny but there was nearly as much space around the engine as my current EV has under the bonnet.
In the end there was nearly as much wire mesh and body putty as sheet steel and there was a nasty draught up your right trouser leg. Its second engine costed £100 including fitting in a tiny garage near Plymouth Central. It finally passed away just off J30 of the M5 (Exeter Services). It was sounding a bit rough whizzing up the A38 and it turned out I had basically blown two cylinders out of four. Well I got a good year out of that engine. The AA recovered it for me back to Plymouth and I got £25 from the scrappers for it in 1994.
Your parent quite literally gave an example.
Arabic as a whole is largely written R2L You note that numbers are written L2R in Arabic.
Mr Harston notes that quoting foreign phrases within Arabic is written according to the preferred direction of the quoted language. English is a habitual L2R language, so english quotes will be L2R.
Not for me it isn't, says (nearly) ex VMware consultant with roughly 20 years experience.
Over those years I've been on the receiving end of so many MVP efforts that I basically had enough and bailed when Broadcom.
Windows vcentres being required and then deprecated, vcentre being a shit appliance, then the transition from Flash to the current effort. Ooh lets run two Tomcats - one to monitor and manage the other one, which is running on the same system, rather than doing a proper job in the first place. vcentres have 15 odd volumes nowadays - WTF! They are monstrous efforts.
OK so vcentre is wank, buggy and slow as fuck. But it isn't even a proper orchestration jobbie - you'll need another VM for that. Again, another sodding monster and you'll want to cluster that for scale. Oooh what about SDN? That will be twenty trillion squid, and yet more VMs and more shite to manage.
I can't be arsed with it anymore.
I'm going all in on KVM and I sort out the orchestration and management myself using off the peg open source stuff. I always go for offerings where there are two options to avoid enshitification.
" still love that, in 2025, explorer just freezes/hangs if you have a network path that's unavailable ANYWHERE on your drive list."
If it helps, it seems that Dolphin does too (Linux box with KDE n that).
Obviously the notion of a "drive" is Windows wankery - one mounts one's remote file systems. I have to live in a Windows world at work - I use pam mount to connect up a series of shares under a single directory. If my VPN is down and I access that folder, things lock up for a while. To be honest it is actually quite quick to recover and does seem to just work most of the time.
The real fix is SMB over https (oh yes!) There is a Kerberos proxy over https too and I have deployed it at work and it does just work for both Windows and Linux. One day I'll look into SMB over https.
Refs wrt Kerberos proxy:
https://syfuhs.net/kdc-proxy-for-remote-access - MS Blog on KDC Proxy
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/779228/the-parameter-is-incorrect-error-using-netsh-http-add-sslcert - SO discussion about http add sslcert
https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/mitK5features.html - MIT Kerberos v1.21 features
https://k5wiki.kerberos.org/wiki/Projects/KDC_Discovery - KDC Discovery via DNS
https://www.mit.edu/~kerberos/krb5-1.21/doc/admin/https.html - MIT Kerberos documentation on using a proxy
"Actually, LLMs are completely deterministic"
No they are not. I have a box at work that is used for backups - it mostly works at night. I slapped a second hand Nvidia GPU in it and a slack handful of llama.cpp, ollama, MCPs and a couple of webby front ends.
There are a lot more parameters than temperature and you also have to consider the front end(s) which might fiddle with a prompt before it is delivered.
There are at least two ways of dealing with ransomware for DR purposes. You will have to accept that you will be losing some data and how much is up to you.
Option 1 is air gapped backups and this is the gold standard. The classic method is tape and you must remove the tapes from the robotics/drive and store them away from the production system.
Option 2 is something like Veeam's "Hardened Linux repo" and using immutability - This is a silver gilt standard method and you have to be very careful with this. A hardened repo uses a one shot admin account to setup a service for the repo - the username and password are not kept on the Veeam backup box after setup. Veeam will ask the service to set the immutable flag on backup files and only remove them after a set time. However, if the backup server has another way to get at the box housing the repos, then the flags can be removed.
Prevention is the best bet but is not infallible (its hard to prevent all future threats)! Air-gapped backups are the gold standard and a suitable LTO drive or two or a full robotics unit and a slack handful of tapes don't cost the earth.
When I somehow managed to decide to give up fags, 2 Apr 2018, after 30 odd years, my plan was to hit a vape to take the edge off. That lasted a few days when I realised I would be swapping one habit for another and I wanted shot of the whole thing.
So I did and I'm glad I did not go the vape route and I can't say it was easy.
What worked for me, was two strategies. Firstly: time period doubling (attaining goals) - one day, two days, half a week, a week a fortnight, a month, two months etc; secondly: I had a couple of "mantras" that I would repeat mentally whenever the cravings hit. They were "I don't want to die" and "I don't want to smell" - two classic symptoms of smoking, one likely in the future and one that is guaranteed permanently. It worked for me but I had to "say" those mantras a lot to start with but it did work.
I did try the conventional methods many years ago. However, to my mind, if nicotine is the addictive ingredient in fags, why don't patches/gum etc work 100% ? I don't think that the "habit" thing holds much water either - I had no problem with that side of things (*). Quite simply, there are other ingredients that are addictive in fags and they are worse than nicotine and there is no other way to ingest them without a burning fag.
I would say that for me it took about two weeks to know I was definitely on track but about 18 months to be able to feel I could (nearly) totally let my guard down. I had some bloody weird dreams at times!
(*) When the pandemic hit, I stopped biting my nails - a habit of over 50 years.
