Posts by Kurgan 620 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Sep 2009
If you make enough noise against AI, you may have a bad accident. Rich people spent too much on AI and are willing to do anything to kill criticism. And critics, too.
I understand why the original author of this project has decided to quit, and the forkers are afraid to go on.
This pushback and ridicule only exists here and in selected, restricted circles.
Quite every person I know uses LLM tools all day long, for personal and work related matters, both IT related and non IT related.
From older people that use voice search on their phones (they basically ask Siri or Google everything they need using voice recognition) to younger people actually using LLMs as their perfect mix of parent, friend and slave: ready to answer every question (wrongly) and to make anything for them (wrongly) and to give them (wrong) advice about life.
It's a race to self destruction that will not stop.
In 15 years we'll have a generation of young adults who will not be able to do ANYTHING without AI telling them how and what to do, micro managing their entire life.
Always run cracked software because you know it will work better and smoother. Copy protection is there not to allow you to run the software, but to DENY it. It's intrinsically a hurdle, so it has to be removed.
Then buy the software if you think they deserve it, but keep running the cracked copies.
A phone is a device that, by design, needs a network to communicate. A smart phone without a network should be able to work in a limited fashion. Like a computer, it should be able to run local programs with local data. I say "should" because, you know, Office365.
A washing machine without a network should be able to wash everything just fine, and it should just not be able to send you a message when it has finished its cycle. Just like, you know, a non-IoT washing machine does.
It's not hard to understand the difference between a car and a phone, or a washing machine and a phone.
True, but this whole thing is basically windows on a Linux kernel plus an emulator layer. So you end up with all the crap that's in windows (copilot, onedrive, ms account, spyware, etc) and an emulation layer to a linux kernel?
It's absolutely insanely useless.
You are throwing away a functional kernel (the windows one) for another one (Linux) and you inherit the shitshow that is Windows 11 userspace? WHY? WHY?
What you want is to run a single windows program (that you need) on a crapless windows (that's Linux and Wine). Not to import all the crap from Windows and then run the program you need.
One of the best descriptions I've seen is that a LLM is just a more sophisticated "auto complete" like the one we have on our phones. And thinking of it, it's right. It takes your input and statistically composes a suitable answer (while the auto complete statistically composes suitable continuation, but the idea is the same)
Anyway the issue with AI is that it often (if not always) produces perfectly written, well documented, and utterly wrong results. And humans take these for good because they look good.
I have never used a LLM intentionally, yet I have come across some of these perfectly written, well documented, and utterly wrong results. Once it was with the analysis of a core dump. Beautiful, well reasoned, WRONG. Another was the conversion of a Dovecot configuration from the old to the new syntax. Again perfectly written, well documented, and TOTALLY WRONG. Wrong in the syntax, wrong in the reasoning, wrong in the explanations it gave.
You know the song "Wrong" by Depeche Mode? That should be the AI theme song.
My gripe is a lot of the things around it which makes ipv6 a hassle, especially when your prefix from 6 changes, all you adapters, and I mean ALL ACROSS YOUR WHOLE LAN, have to automatically follow suit. Which means: When connected to the Internet a lot of formerly static ipv4 configuration cannot be static any more - unless your provider gives you a fixed ipv6.
This is one of the worst parts of it. And even if your provider gives you a static assignment, what happens when you change provider? Or if you failover on a multi wan connection? Or even try to load balance on a multi wan connection?
The only way IPV6 can be used with the same (even better) flexibility of v4 is when you own you v6 addresses and use a dynamic routing protocol, which is not what a small business usually does. A home user even less.
Then there is the security nightmares v6 can give you. I can't even imagine how many ways of abusing it are simply yet to be discovered, apart from the obvious ones like the fact that even if you don't use v6 to connect to the internet, you LAN has FE80 addresses all around and you have to firewall the hell out of it unless you want someone that penetrated the LAN to use them to move laterally almost for free.
You just described Italian Mail service "Poste Italiane" which also doubles as a "sort of" a bank. My father died, I had a death certificate and a declaration from my mother that she renounced her part of the inheritance. Went to the bank, no problem. Went to Poste Italiane, every possible problem. It took 2 years and 10 visits to their office.
The reason because no one uses Linux on desktop is Office. The lack of, I mean. I use Linux since 25 years, and I'm fine with Libreoffice. I'm a sysadmin, so apart from Office, everything else is actually much better on Linux than on Windows, so for me it's easy. But for every other worker that uses a computer, it's simply impossible because there is no Office, no Autocad, no commercial program that they have to use.
And there is no solution to this because of course MS will never produce a Linux version of Office, the one and only program that allows them to rule the world. And no other commercial software will ever be ported to Linux until it has 50% of the desktop market, which it will never have because of there is no commercial software for a Linux desktop.
Now, SAAS has made a very tiny dent in this situation, since some (but not all) SAAS products work fine on a browser (I mean, on Chrome, only Chrome, always Chrome, no other browser than Chrome, it seems) on Linux. Not all of them becauuuuse.. OFFICE. Yes, they need Excel to work.
How can anyone win against windows and office in the current situation?
This issue exists also in Italy. 20 yeard ago there has been a lot of mobile sim activated with a simple photocopy of an ID card, and today nothing has changed. A trove of scanned ID cards is available to every criminal and they can be used to buy sim cards in the name of the person on the scanned ID.
Now we have new digital ID cards, that are smartcards with a digital signature system embedded into them. Now is should be easy to sign a contract using them, even online, but still no one uses them this way. We still do scan them and use these as proof of identity. Bureaucracy at its best. After all a fax is still a legally binding document.
And it needs cleaning. A lot of cleaning, if you have cats. And it tangles in mostly anything.
I bought the first model: it costed a lot, it worked quite fine, but in the end the time I lost cleaning it, deploying it to every room where it could not go by itself, and recovering it when it tangled on something, made me think that in the end if I vacuum the floor I do it better and more or less in the same time.
I had also tried to organize the house to make it roomba friendly, but still I had issues with some furniture it got stuck under.
So in then end I once the battery died and then a motor died I stopped using it. I bought an expensive battery operated manual vacuum and while it's still expensive, batteries die, and plastic breaks, in the end the result is better and the time I spend doing chores is the same. Now if only I could find a working battery powered and manually operated vacuum that does not cost 800 euros and actually works...
And of course I won't buy any more robotic cleaner with cloud, account, subscription, AI, spyware and a ticking clock counting down to its planned obsolescence.
I was talking to a friend this morning about this, and he said there is no way on the device itself to apply an ACL that simply drops traffic from unsecure addresses (a simple ip-based ACL). There is no way of doing it. You can apply convoluted web server configs but no simple network ACLS on these devices. I hope my friend was wrong because it seems idiotic to me.
There are lots of issues here, but surely the biggest one is that it's web based. The other is that it's closed, the next is that devs don't understand security. They never do. And a big repo full of credentials is a fucking big target, so it will be under constant attack from big criminal groups.
I'd never use a commercial, closed, web based password manager. NEVER.
I use KeepassXC with keyfile, password, and on an encrypted drive, on Linux. And I really hope that no one will sneak a backdoor into KeepassXC as has already happened in other open source software.
There will probably come a time when I'll drop password managers completely and use text files on an encrypted drive. Less risk of being targeted by supply chain attack if you don't use a password manager at all but use another encryption method.
Actually as a ham radio operator I believe it, because some digital protocols we use are slower than that.
And while 10 bps is indeed slow even for a pure text transmission, I reckon that 9600 is absolutely fine for a lot of applications (no multimedia of course) and that our current tera-bloated internet is the result of us being absolutely insanely stupid, because apart from applications like 4K streaming, normal web sites and apps and chat services and so on should be fine with less than 500 Kbit of bandwidth.
I'm not a Vmware expert at all, but I think the issue here is that every open source solution is based on KVM. They are all fancy UIs over KVM. And since KVM lacks a storage backend that allows for the same storage to be shared between multiple hosts, no fancy UI can make it happen. And if I get it right vmware uses a file system (vmfs) that can indeed be mounted at the same time by multiple hosts. This is its big advantage, and this is why it's easy in Vmware to share a single storage between multiple hosts.
So now KVM is working on an LVM on iSCSI solution that should allow for multiple access (it's not "mounting") because you don't actually mount anything, it's not a file system. But it seems it's still not good enough. Anyway, once this thing works, then every fancy UI will work, too.
Then it will even be possible to share a storage between Vmware and Proxmox, by simply creating 2 LUNs and assigning each one to a different hypervisor cluster. And at that point you can actually manage to move machines and then add LUNs to the LVM group to "eat up" the space left by the now-unused Vmware LUNs.
I really can't believe that this is indeed a needed feature. Are there so many users that want to use TB to connect to on-prem exchange using a deprecated protocol?
As a freelance sysadmin and consultant I tend to drive my customers to open source solutions, so on-prem mail server with Linux, Exim, Dovecot, and TB.
I'd never suggest Exchange+TB, the same way that I don't suggest Linux on the mail server and Outlook (old) on the clients. And if a customer wants to use Exchange, I'd surely tell them "ok, fine, so you get to use Outlook, too" (and then hand them to a MS sysadmin)
TB on Exchange is as evil as Outlook on IMAP.
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