Posts by Kerfufflinator

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Childish curiosity really wants me to try to nmap from all my vps boxen. Their rules seem to have something against such shenanigans.

Microsoft makes Copilot easier to summon, harder to ignore in Office

"We heard from many of you that you're unsure how to start engaging with Copilot,"

Is it just me or did MS recently start talking about reducing Copilot (https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/03/24/windows-boss-promises-to-heal-the-operating-systems-wounds/5223630) because of user backlash? Or did I dream that?

Hashicorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub ‘no longer a place for serious work’

Re: Unofficial github status page - the one MS don't have

Not that I am defending github, but this does make me wonder if a large part of the issue is them struggling with volume. The uptime has been worsening over the last six months and it sort of coincides with agentic workflows becoming more of a thing. Also, there are things like Lovable. You give it a prompt and it builds a little software project, but behind the scenes, that's a github repo. I can see how they could be having a lot of issues simply due to unprecedented (and probably unexpected) volumes.

I, of course, understand that it's had plenty of issues before (morbidly hilarious reading in the issues mentioned in the zig migrating to codeberg post - https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ - especially the safe_sleep issue), but surely this compounds it significantly.

Another nail of many..

I can relate to "doomscrolling github", especially the last few years. I've been reading slop pull requests on repos I follow, and cackling about "How did you test it?" "I tested it thoroughly!" sort of interactions. But this is just morbid curiosity combined with scrolling socials.

Microsoft updates the Windows Update Experience: You can hit pause now

Actually yeah, you're right, it's up to 35 days, there is no indefinite option. But setting active hours is a thing. And I am on win 11, without this latest update.

Wait, is this really new? I thought you could already stop them indefinitely or for a period of time...

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Most of the money goes to the author?

Oh, I had just assumed they meant e-books, since this is an article about kindles.

Re: Most of the money goes to the author?

Quick google tells me it's up to 70% for books under 10$. Where did you get "pennies"?

Generally agreed, but for people who self-publish, I do like actually paying for the books. Of course, Amazon takes a cut, but most of that money still goes to the author, not some publisher. Most of these authors do have some online presence though, so there are other ways I can pay them. But this is very much like buying stuff from bands you like on bandcamp, instead of just listening to them on Spotify, especially if they are small local bands.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

Re: its a conspiracy

Ahhh, so that means I should wait for the surplus HBMs for cheap, so I can make my own hyperscaler AI business shenanigans.

*Greedily rubs hands

It's a good time to be the arms dealer for the AI boom

Re: Flowerpots

Oh yeah, I am aware the prices have gone up a lot recently. Just wondering where it's leading and what will happen.

Cheers for the link.

Re: Flowerpots

So what you're saying is that if I want to buy a heap (hehehe) of RAM for my homelab, I just need to wait for the bubble to burst and the poor RAM manufacturers trying to scale down manufacturing and selling the excess for cheap? Or is that dumb? Genuine question.

UK toughens Online Safety Act with ban on self-harm content

Re: Effective laws would kill the business model.

As much as I dislike the Online Safety Act, this is a poor analogy. A more apt one would be to say that if ASDA sold me a knife that was branded as "The Stabber 9000: Best out there for killing quickly!", then yes, I think ASDA should be on the hook for it.

Oracle's $40B Nvidia hardware haul may be too hot for OpenAI's Abilene, Texas DC to handle

Re: location! location! location!

> space may be cold as long as you are shaded from the sun otherwise it gets very hot fast....and if you are shaded no solar power.

Unless you are in the shade of the solar panels, like for example the James Webb Space Telescope (yes, yes, it's a bit smaller than a data center, but there is lots of space in.. ehrm.. space).

I feel stupid. I just don't understand the push to build data centers in Texas. A hot place. A place notorious for power cuts because of insane weather. And adding up to 1.2 GW (or 1.45 GW or whatever it ends up being) of demand on top of that? And then also cooling...

Is it cheap? Is there less political resistance?

I understand that you can't just place them in the arctic or on an old oil platform somewhere cold because supplying 1.2 GW to remote locations is not trivial and having to build a power plant along with the data center is a big undertaking. But Texas?

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

"Also, on a related note, I don't really understand why there's a stereotype of Debian being behind the times. It's always seemed perfectly sane to me to have a stable repo that's actually stable (like 700 days uptime stable), and then testing for more bleeding edge use cases.

I am enjoying running hyprland on my laptop with Debian testing/experimental. But Devuan all the way for anything server related. Also nice that Debian has great ARM support for Raspi and other ARM based systems."

Aren't those two paragraphs the exact issue you're asking about in them? I too wanted to try Hyprland, but Debian stable is too far behind the times to be supported. I like keeping my daily driver as the stable version though so I thought "whatever, maybe in a VM one day when I'm bored..."

I do wonder why you insist that "Devuan all the way for anything server related". Can you elaborate? Is SystemD that significant of a slog performance-wise that it makes a noticeable difference? Or are your servers really old that it matters? Or does it feel unnecessarily complex?

I'm not trying to be cheeky, just looking for some elaboration. Got Devuan on an ancient laptop that these days is only used for watching an episode of something while eating - yes, we are a proud (stupid?) TV-less people. With SystemD, I understand intellectually how it goes against the principles of doing one thing only and doing it well, but in practice it has never been an issue for me.

BOFH: There's a fatal error in the blinkenlights

This is bittersweet. Loved the article, but also discovered that I can no longer watch Star Wars over telnet...

Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital

Surely the “percutaneous driveline” could be replaced with a USB-C connector and the batteries held in the heart itself. Who wouldn't want to plug in before sleep as if they were a phone??

All jokes aside, this is seriously amazing.

So this one time, at Bandcamp, half the staff were laid off

Sad, sad reality. In many genres, though metal is the one I'm most familiar with, bandcamp is a cornerstone in the underground movements and local scenes.

All that corpo speak about passion for the music and serving artists is bollocks. Songtradr is just a big investment venture acquiring companies left and right. It exists to serve the shareholders. Nothing good can come of this (for the music community anyway).

Yes, I'm very bitter about this.

Astronomers spot collision between two exoplanets, both feared vaporized

10^33 joules? What kind of unit is that? I would like to know how many tonnes of oats I need to ingest to obtain the same calorific value. You know, to put things in perspective.

P.S. Somebody here told me it's useful if you want to monitor horsepower years.

CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted

Re: Now what am I going to do with it?

It's worse. To get the SI unit Joule, you should use m/s for speed, so (3x10^8 m/s)^2 = 9x10^16 joules.

To put it in sensible units, you'd have to eat about 67 billion tonnes of oats for the same calorific intake.

Microsoft drops out of top three for UK software and IT services

Re: Their recent record speaks for itself

Why do you say that Azure's design is inherently flawed when it comes to resilience? Genuine question.

Leave it to Beaver: Unity is long gone and you're on your GNOME

My favorite distro name since Feisty Fawn. Can the next one be Contemptuous Cephalopod? Also nice to see GNOME taking the front seat again. I haven't used Ubuntu since 10.04 (or was it 12.04? been a while) iirc but now the chat is about folk smoothly transitioning from Unity to GNOME? I remember when it was the other way around and made a lot of people seethe. Far be it from me saying it's anything more than nostalgia, but perhaps time to try Ubuntu again? Or maybe Lubuntu?

And Wayland was default for 17.10?? Boy, I'm really out of the loop.