Posts by HereIAmJH 646 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Aug 2010
Get your own domain. Set up a catch all mailbox. Use a unique email address for each site that requires you to set up an account. elreg@example.com pw: qgDhfNzhDqEBct5yUsnQ The only down side is I have to set up an actual mailbox if I need to send them email from that email account.
Additional benefit is you know which sites are selling your contact info.
Why is any competent organization still using Solar Winds? How many times do you have to be brutally hacked before you say 'enough'? Is this some kind of new IT BDSM fetish? Does your staff get paid overtime to completely rebuild all of the systems on your network? None can be trusted any longer.
But why should I be surprised? Big Tech has actually bought George Orwell's fears to life but it's been declared "OK" because someone is making money off of it.
You have simply misunderstood. Palantir protects your rights by holding them for you. They will tell you when you can use them. An officer from Minitrue will be by to 'escort' you to re-education.
Why do you assume it can do the job?
I assume it can do the job, because more and more AI is doing the job.
If there's a network problem, can it continue to do the job?
If you work remotely and there is a network problem, can you continue to do your job?
The US is headed for mass unemployment, and no one is prepared
If AI capability doubles every 7 months, how long do you think knowledge workers will still have jobs?
but there's a reason why employees don't generally get to outsource their work to someone or something else without permission
You make the assumption that it's outsourcing because you don't believe employees will invest in the tools to create their own AI agents. Just like they don't pay for their own college degrees, I guess.
If I have a particular set of skills, why should I not be able to build an AI agent perform those tasks. Then I can license (ie. receive a paycheck) those abilities to employers. Some things will be bog standard tasks, and employers should build their own agents (sys admin, etc). Although they won't, they'll buy a commercial package. But there are others that require special knowledge and continually evolve. An example here is security monitoring and pen testing beyond the basics.
If I have an agent to handle the day-to-day, I can spend my time increasing my knowledge in my chosen domain. That won't be an option if the belief that the purpose of all outside use of AI is illegitimate.
As I read that, my thought was "Does it matter that it's AI if it can do the job?"
Why is it that employers deploying AI systems to replace workers is ethical, but if an employee sets up an AI to do their work it's a scam?
Some people have said "what a wonderful day it will be when machines free people of having to do work." But if the above is true, the wealthy will own everything and the population will starve.
I start typing the address ans instead of giving me the base domain it autocompletes with some weird page that I visited ages ago and if I want to go go the main page I have to edit the whole long URL...
This is the thing that will eventually force me to give up Vivaldi. I have web sites that I go to daily, but don't have bookmarked. It will work fine typing in just the first couple of letters for weeks, then suddenly it will start suggesting a link that I clicked on once. I have tried all kinds of Address Field Suggestions options, and nothing seems to help. It seems so simple to resolve, just suggest URLs that I have previously typed in, and weight them by the number of times I have used them.
"Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted"
The article starts with a bad assumption, the title. My first thought was that leaving Microsoft isn't going to prove that he can be trusted. Locking down Linux in a Microsoft Trusted Computing methodology isn't going to make it more trustworthy. It will just make systems harder to maintain.
Assuming that a successor to init is desirable, couldn’t people fork systemd, keep its init core -making it compatible with various service consumers - and ditch the rest of the Borg?
Possible, but no telling how much cutting and massaging of code would be required to resolve inter-dependencies. And it wouldn't solve the bulk of the problem, apps being written to rely on systemd and expecting all it's components to exist.
Can't say exactly how either Debian or Gnome are working in this case, but what is probably happening is that the desktop (gnome-shell) needs to be able to play sounds - even if it is only a beep when an error box comes up.
PC architecture has included a simple speaker since nearly the beginning. An IBM XT with DOS can supply simple sounds for alerts but a modern OS can't?
You could argue that you should be able to remove pipewire and use a simpler sound system such as ALSA, which is reasonable. But to be able to do that, gnome-shell and all the other desktop packages would need to be built to use ALSA for sound.
The problem then is that things are being written for specific sound services and not a common hardware interface. Imagine if apps had to be written for specific hard drives. There should be a minimum API for sound, regardless of the underlying sound service. Then for advanced functionality you'd check the API version and make your call accordingly.
If you don't like the way Linux is going, then please go install Windows 11 and then let us know how you get on with Microsoft's madness.
I've had a lengthy career in tech, and I have supported Window's OSs in business critical applications. Anywhere from keeping core business functionality running to life or death situations. Based off of the general direction Windows OSs are going, Win10 and Server 2022 are the last I will deploy. I have a quarter century experience with Linux as well.
I have a copy of Slackware 1.1 on Floppy that you are welcome to.
I have no floppy drives, can you burn me an ISO?
If I wanted to put the effort into it I have both the technical and development skills to build my systems using Gentoo or Linux from Scratch (LFS). I have no desire to do that any longer. I'll just stick around to annoy the "do it our way or leave" bunch, such as yourself.
Once upon a time Firefox was a leading browser and rising. I never imagined I'd prefer a Microsoft browser over it. Then they ignored the user base chasing "shiny new squirrels". Now they are racing toward a 2% market share.
I feel KDE is doing the same with systemd and Wayland. For now I can use a different login manager. If KDE core adds a systemd dependency I'll lock down my version, stop updating, and start evaluating replacements.
Developers need to start paying attention when users draw a line in the sand; AI, systemd, Wayland, disabling uBlock Origin with Chrome manifest v3.
Because they haven't been deploying large numbers of ICE/CBP agents to Red states. It's really that simple.
Why don't we see 1000 ICE agents deployed to Dallas or Miami? Surely with the help of Abbot and DeSantis we'd be hearing about record numbers of arrests of illegals.
The system is completely broken and founded on future investors paying current retirees benefits. There is a term for that, just on the tip of my tongue.
It's called a benefit.
In regards to SSA, it's also a problem that will resolve itself. Previous estimates were that when the SSA Trust Fund ran out that benefits would drop to 83% of what they currently are. I suspect it will be lower, probably in the low 70s due to the current administration doing everything they can to kill the economy, and layoffs caused by AI.
The main problem is the Boomer generation reaching retirement age and it's much larger than succeeding generations. It could be a rough 20 years, but once the large generation dies off the system will return to normal. (assuming the economy doesn't collapse entirely due to national debt)
The biggest threat to SSA is not it's ability to pay benefits. It's all the ways people are intentionally trying to kill it. Such as the idea of privatizing it. If you want private funding for retirement, you can, and should, already being doing it through 401k and IRAs. Something you might want to think about, SSA benefits were not affected by the 2008 stock market crash. Can you say the same about private retirements accounts? And since healthcare is a leading cost in America, contribute as much as you can to an HSA if you have access to one. The average benefit paid by SSA is $2000/mo. Out of that you are going to pay a minimum of 10% on $8000 of it in Federal Income tax. And $2400/yr for Medicare premiums. So figure average monthly income of $1700. Is that the retirement you want? SSA is a safety net, not a salary replacement.
Something else that would help the public understand it would be to stop reporting SS payments as part of the Federal Budget. It is NOT part of the budget, it is paid through payroll deductions that are earmarked for SSA. Those funds can either go to paying benefits, administration, or the trust fund. The federal budget is much smaller than reported and isn't reduced by SSA retirement payments. The two largest expenditures are military and interest on debt.
BTW, to the OP, there are no 'investors' in Social Security. It's a funded program. Just like the taxes you pay on gasoline that are earmarked for highways. You are NOT an investor in the Interstate Highway System either. If Congress chose to do so, they could shut down the SSA and Medicare, and retire the FICA tax structure at any time, and nobody would be owed anything. Assuming they never wanted to get elected again and OK with 70m starving Seniors who own guns.
So now we have confirmation of what we suspected. DOGE stole all the SSA data.
Accessing the encrypted files should be easy. Drag the sender and all the recipients into court. Tell them to open the files. When they refuse, charge them with contempt and put them in jail until they open them. Problem solved.
Then we can work on prosecuting them for violating Federal data privacy laws.
I've lost data to IBM Deathstars (including one that was a warranty replacement). Their successor Hitachi. And Western Digital. I've done fairly well with Seagate, going back to their 40mb stiction days. Seems like if I keep them spinning they do pretty good. In storage, not so good. I pulled several low hour 5tb disks off the shelf to test OMV and they were all dead. Ended up having to install it on an old laptop drive that I replaced with SSD while I decide what size new drives to purchase. Considering using 10tb drives. Seriously, do people actually buy refurb/renewed hard drives? BTW, I use slower 5400 drives and make sure I have good temp control fans in the NAS. And good, clean power.
Elmo is rich, but a lot of his wealth is on paper only and is flying on hype. TLSA is trading at nearly 25 times it's book value. So market cap TLSA is $1.46T, book value $60B. That is a lot of hype for a company that is struggling. It's like saying your net worth is the sum of your potential income for the next 30 years, rather than the value of the assets you own.
AI will live or die based on it's ability to provide value. It will provide value, but nowhere near what is being promised. At least not for the next decade or two. Some of these 'visionaries' will go broke and disappear. Unfortunately, I don't expect Elmo will be one of them. Too many worshipers in the Temple of Musk who continue to blindly follow him.
Trump administration is blocking COVID stimulus oversight: government watchdog letter - June 2020
If the technology had existed in 2020, they wouldn't have been allowed to use it.
Something many of my fellow Americans don't understand when they complain about 'giving' all that money to Ukraine is the value of knowledge. We spent 50 years of Cold War using proxy wars testing our 2nd tier equipment against the USSR's 2nd tier equipment. Now we've had the capability of testing our 2nd tier equipment against Russia's 1st tier equipment. As well as seeing how the battlefield has evolved due to new technology like cheap drones. So what's in it for us? The ability to integrate new combat tested weapons and strategies into our military, and it only costs money.
Hopefully your politicians are better at expressing that significant benefit than mine have been.
A couple decades ago I looked at Gnome, and it seemed like they copied every bad thing about Windows desktops. I have been using KDE since, but sometimes need a little GTK.
Seems like the worst was background windows stealing focus when it made sense to the background app, not the user. Nothing like suddenly typing a password into the wrong window.
v6 does integrate the v4 space at e.g. 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.104.18.4.22, so I don't buy your assertion that you can't do it in v6
You can't do it because IPv6 REQUIRES MORE than just extending the address space.
What do you gain by going from uint32 to uint64? A whole lot of new addresses. Google says 4,294,967,295 vs 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.
Why not go larger? The fucking original premise that if network gear is using 64 bit CPUs then it still all fits in a single register, allowing you to work with it without messing with memory locations.
But it's all just a bullshit what-if, not some serious plan for another IP protocol. Maybe we can IPv6 the Unix timestamp next decade too.
No, you can't, because NAT doesn't have a mechanism to prevent inbound connectivity.
Please, connect to 10.1.1.25 on my internal network. There are no rules on my NAT to forward any kind of inbound initiated traffic on my public IP. Poor man's firewall.
There is no way you're getting around changing packet headers, no matter what solution you choose. Unless it's just stay with IPv4 forever. But it's a whole lot easier to change uint32 to uint64 in the code and increment the protocol version than it is to do all the stuff that is in IPv6.
And you don't have to re-allocate existing IPv4 addresses because all that would happen is the high order bits would be 0. 104.18.4.22 becomes 0.0.0.0.104.18.4.22. Reserved addresses wouldn't need changed. Private network blocks would still work. It would be a problem for anyone foolish enough to convert IPs into dotted quad strings and assume any IP starting with 0. is reserved. You can't do this with IPv6 because all the new rules they implemented for IPs, not because they are increasing the address size.
The question that comes to my mind is; does current network gear use 64bit CPUs? If so, it would make little difference if you changed 'IPv4.5' to a 64-bit number. The full address would still fit in a single register. With NAT there shouldn't be the incredible future demand for IPs that they originally planned for. And it should be possible to implement without giving everyone new IPs. Bragging rights for OG IPv4 addresses....
Ultimately the world in general has demonstrated by its choices that it prefers obese and shoddy code that's thrown together as quickly as possible (preferably quicker) but that only works when the wind is prevailing in a South-Westerly direction over well-engineered systems and that ain't gonna change anytime soon (or likely at all).
And now realize that same mentality will be used for critical systems, like autonomous cars, military drones, and medical devices.
Speaking of medical devices, I have one that has a 'daily' reminder. The alarm has never been configured, there appears to be no place in the settings to configure it, and it only triggers randomly days or weeks apart at different times of the day. You can snooze it, but you can't disable it.
If the day of SkyNet ever comes, it will be because of sloppy QA and decision makers wanting to be first to market. Although I have to say, I'd prefer Maximum Overdrive over Terminator.
First they have to produce an electric truck that Americans want to buy. They told us we didn't want small trucks, then Ford couldn't make half the Mavericks they could have sold. I tried to buy one in 2023, they didn't have any, wouldn't take an order, wouldn't put me on a list to buy one in the future. Then they told us to buy the F150 lightening, because we don't want an electric Maverick. Instead we get to wait for some totally new design that might become available eventually. I have bought one new truck since the S10 was discontinued, a Toyota Tacoma that was as big as my '94 F350 and I hated it. I'll be signing up for a Slate if they get far enough to deliver them.
Another American problem is a lot of the EVs are huge monsters. People feel they have to go big because all the other big cars on the road. This makes all the cars very expensive. Do you want to drop $80k on a new company, like Fisker, and risk it being unsupported in a couple years? Or have to deal with an Elmo like Tesla? Or how about the cost of insurance because a fender bender will total your Rivian?
Ford can complain that the market isn't there all they want. It is, they just can't see it or don't want to build for it.
Age verification is the new thing. I can't even access RedGifs without verifying or using a VPN. That tends to make Reddit annoying at times. What better way to monetize your userbase than say "gov't requires us to get a copy of your ID for access". Just think of all the personal data, I mean Analytics, that they can capture with minimal user pushback. And Boomers think just having to create an account to access a web site is out of hand. What do you think your government will do; protect your privacy or "think of the children".
My last employer went agile. Of course we spent a stupid amount of time in meetings. I think on one project we had 6 PMs of different flavors with only 20-30 people actually writing code. Hour long 'standups'. God help you if you interfaced with multiple teams. As a senior developer I spent 3-4 hours a day in meetings of some kind. Forget about doing any coding when audit season came around.
Knowing the business is definitely an asset, but I've worked with a LOT of short term contractors that know the software tech and absolutely nothing about the business. It happens a lot in large companies that want to tackle a large project but don't want to increase headcount. I have worked on multi-million dollar projects where 90+% of the team were contractors.
If the AI is doing the coding, then can a business analyst do the guiding? At smaller companies can power users interface with LLMs to build the apps? Let's see how much shadow IT comes out of this.
From the downvotes I get every time I bring up AI killing developer jobs, a lot of people here don't like the idea. I have decades of experience writing code, I like doing it, but I wouldn't start a career doing it now.
With "Mission Accomplished" you are confusing technical limitation with a political reality. Technically, it would have been possible to do it in a week with WWII technology if it was politically acceptable to have high civilian casualties.
From a technical perspective, when was the last time you had to tune a carburetor on a car? OBDII has turned many automotive mechanics into parts changers. While I don't want to be anywhere near a Waymo, it's not logical to think that self driving cars aren't the future. The things we do with the Internet and cell phones was unthinkable 25 years ago. Some technology fails, but never bet against technology in the long run.
And it's not build datacenters and the rest will follow. AI is driving the construction of datacenters, new energy production, advances in computing via GPU/NPU. Right now businesses are willing to invest in technology that will change the landscape of IT. The degree of change is dependent on how much money they are willing to spend.
"it" i.e. AI cannot currently fully understand context. So (say) generated SQL joins can be silly.
There are already plenty of apps using ORMs. ORMs don't generate the best SQL, but often what they do create is good enough. Sometimes is comes down to paying a 6 figure salary for a developer vs buying a larger server.
That said, how many here have had a manager that looks at the rough code and observes that the project is basically done and just needs a software dev to "release it"?
I have never had a manager qualified to look at any code. Yet when the date arrives that they have given to upper management, they say "release it".
What about when a company decides to do a toolchain shift? Think y2k. How many jobs would have been lost if we had AI to convert COBOL to C++? What about feeding the Linux kernel into AI and tell it to generate it in Rust? What if a company could eliminate all their legacy codebase in a couple months using AI and a small staff of testers? There are hundreds of millions of <insert currency of choice> in potential government work that could be eliminated by AI updating neglected systems.
I don't think it will make app building more accessible. I think it's going to make it automatic and eliminate the need to write code. It's a few years in the future, but not very many years.
What you're saying is that an experienced, senior developer can indeed make use of an LLM to steer it to some code that might actually do what you want it to.
I think we're probably going to have to learn to walk before we can run. The example in the article was too complicated. I don't think we should be trying to have it flesh out complete apps yet. Instead, that senior developer is going to feed the LLM the various stories in the application. Maybe down to button click level. What if you could feed it a unit test and have it build an implementation? It won't have inexperienced coders (or business analysts) building apps right now. But it will allow corporations the ability to gut project teams. You won't get rid of the highest paid developer yet, but you'll dump 5-10 junior developers for each one of them. That's a significant savings already.
And of course, as we use the tools the AI designers will learn the deficiencies and the senior developers will work themselves out of a job. Kind of like training your off-shore replacement.
This is true, but for the sake of taking 5 minutes to fill out a bug report,
5 minutes to fill out a bug report? You aren't spending time diagnosing the problem to determine if it's truly a bug and not your configuration? You aren't documenting steps to reproduce it? Not to criticize, but are you sure you are creating useful bug reports? While it may be time well spent, I suspect reporting a bug is taking much more than 5 minutes of your time.
That will not go down well in Trumpistan especially with RFK jnr making decisions about vaccines.
We're taking the 'if I don't see it, it didn't happen' approach. And 'lalalalala' don't tell me what I don't want to hear.
And to make sure the bad news doesn't make it to the public, we're dismantling the CDC and there will be no resources available to react anyway. COVID could have been less deadly in the US if the gov't had started preparations when they knew it was coming. But they waited 3 months hoping it would go away because it was an election year. Just stocking up on masks would have helped. And pulling all of the emergency ventilators out of storage and recertifying them.
When the next pandemic comes along, and there will be one, you'll just have to quarantine us until we reach herd immunity.
I'm not a fan of moving everything to 'the cloud'. Whether it's CloudFlare or AWS or Azure. But they are useful tools that we will all appreciate next week when the holiday sales kick off. The lesson here is compartmentalization. A problem like this shouldn't be able to cross datacenters. From my developer days I realize that there is never enough time to test everything. There are often not the correct tools available or procedures in place. Management hates to spend the money to duplicate production systems so you have a reliable test environment. And while it complicated deploys, I appreciated when processes were in place that would keep my fuckup from putting a company wide, or worldwide, spotlight on me. And example, I had a policy of only updating one node in a cluster per day on critical applications. Not only did that mean updates took a lot longer, it also meant that version x had to be able to work with version x+1 and version x-1.
And for those romanticizing the good old days of Big Telephone, you should go back and refresh your memory of the 1990 AT&T 4ESS long distance outage.
They couldn't route around Manchester, because it wasn't the only one down. I spent the morning seeing that Cloudflare Denver was down. And despite what Cloudflare says, it wasn't 'some traffic' it was all traffic for affected sites. It was intermittent at the start, then just stopped trying at all. And for more than just a couple hours.
And I'd like to point out that they haven't resolved all their problems yet. Just now trying to reply to your post I kept getting 'rate limited' error messages. After a few tries I then got a message that The Register had banned my IP for too many attempts. (5?) But I could access any other Reg URL that I tried.
I'm throwing my support behind apps that use AppImage, No worrying if you're running the right distro and have the correct versions of supporting libraries installed. I never have a shortage of RAM or disk space any longer, and no desire to tinker to make things work.
Kind of my thought when I read the article. Despite the headline, China hasn't asked and is unlikely to because they don't need help. And SpaceX probably couldn't provide assistance anyway because they don't have the correct hardware. They can't do a previously scheduled 'rescue' mission and they don't have spare Dragons. Let's just hope there's no repeat of the Pedo Guy incident.
Peoples freedoms, or lack thereof cannot be decided by a computer, otherwise we are ultimately enslaved by the owners of the machine.
I never was one to fear the government, being male and white. Until recently. Now I wonder if those helicopters flying over from a nearby Airforce base are just on training flights, or supporting a masked secret police force. And in the past I wouldn't have noticed that AWACs taking off, now I wonder why it's coming from a commercial airport and what is it doing in middle America. I don't want justice served from a computer program because the government is not trustworthy.
The greater point I am trying to make here being that this is
1. hard
2. largely undocumented
3. (presumably) relies on practitioners with extensive prior knowledge
4. seems to be badly dated with the latest info being from 4 or 5 years ago
I hate to be snarky, but welcome to Linux. It has always been that way. When you are searching for answers not only are documentation and forum messages 5 years old, but processes tend to be different depending on the distribution that you run. You criticized me in the past for using ifconfig when I should have known that everyone had moved on to IP. But ifconfig works for what I need, used to be part of virtually every distro, and it was consistent in how it worked. That meant it didn't matter if the documentation was 5 years old or non-existent, I could rely on my own prior knowledge.
I know it's also an open source lazy response, but if we don't like the way things are we can fix them. Maybe we should be looking at centralizing and updating documentation. Launch a Linux Wikipedia with the accumulated knowledge of all the grey beards. Before we all die off. And while the Devuan installer might be pretty complicated, in the larger scheme of things it's fairly small and a couple individuals with some talent could make it a whole lot better. In spite of the 'disenchanted Deep Debian Beards'. Or are you saying that if someone wanted to improve the Devuan installer that they would tell us to fork off because it's supposed to be hard?
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