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  Reading a UCB PhD thesis from 1974 republished as an MIT Technical Report. The general rule of thumb now is: Humans emit clue, when clueful. LLMs regurgitate and distort said clue. They do NOT emit NEW clues. For me to ask them to contribute to original research would be largely pointless... the computational shotgun machine performs poorly when actual understanding is needed, or they mean-reverted to something in the training set because they couldn't process the query contextually. I wi...

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  Resilience. Yeah so the backup 5G radio here is only known to work properly with Quectel's Win11 MBIM driver, not happy about that, but there's a 12V Li-Ion inline UPS pack on its way for the VDSL2 line.

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  Now playing. The old ones are the best ones.

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  I had a B450 board die this week, luckily I had a not-so-identical twin system with same which was idle. That said, I just sent the faulty board off under RMA to the vendor today. I specced up boards for Intel Precision Time Measurement (PTM) which is 1PPS over PCIe traces. New buys are typically B760M, aftermarket is B660M. Like with so many "interesting" Intel features, direct hardware qualification is necessary, as they don't list everything on ARK; anecdata can be checked agai...

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  Some days, one wishes to be the disappearing hitchhiker from the UK Channel 5 TV idents.

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  These days, I am constantly reminded of Philip K. Dick's concept he employed in "Ubik": the inertial, an individual capable of nullifying psychic effects. I must cultivate inertia; I must aspire to be truly inertial. As my closest advisors in "meatspace" have said: the best thing to do in the awkward psychosocial situation in which I have been placed over the last month, such as it may be, is to say nothing, and do nothing.

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  So I switched daily browser this week from the least bad Chromium fork to the least bad Firefox fork, thinking that reduced CPU burst might reduce my exposure to my Acer [heavily patched for security and privacy] Win11 laptop's wonky power management behaviour now the battery has died (replacement on order, must chase up). The thing tends to die shortly after power-on, or if I open a browser, and hibernation doesn't work. It helped a little, not a lot. Only to find I'd f...

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  I'm looking into what it takes to fully Capsicumize a Python process in FreeBSD. It's not just about the file descriptor rights and filesystem visibility. There are distinct dependencies by Python modules on system calls which may not be CAPENABLED. I ground it out on subprocess for a start. Whist Python 3.12 os.execve() (and thus os.exec*()) shims to fexecve() and SHOULD work if $PATH is modified to be relative, there are no such guarantees for the subprocess module.

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  To my mind, Ross Anderson was being pragmatic, when he insisted in his text "Security Engineering, 3e" that computer & information security models should more closely reflect underlying human trust relationships, and it could be said that capabilities models let one achieve that more readily, than the constant exercise of trying to close gaps exposed by security models rooted solely in Access Control Lists (ACLs), which amount to a form of fire-fighting; hence the HP La...

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  Field testing KScope 1.8.2 for KDE Frameworks 6, with a detour through the FreeBSD kernel's descriptor passing code paths, i.e. the SCM_RIGHTS control message for UNIX domain sockets (allegedly, supporting this makes a UNIX-like OS a "real UNIX").

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  AI FAIL

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  Motivation to do systems administration my own systems tonight: 0

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  @bellegraylane@universeodon.com @gvwilson@mastodon.social Axl screams "You Could Be Mine" -- 13 year old me would fire that up as a cassette single while blowing away Kraits in Amiga Elite with military lasers fitted to my Cobra Mk III

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  According to RIPE Labs, IPv6 prefixes enjoy a ~68% higher level of ROA signing amongst small-scale RPKI servers for BGP routing security, and of those ROAs, only ~1.2% do not validate. https://labs.ripe.net/author/ties-dirksen/whos-running-all-those-tiny-rpki-servers/

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  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bowdlerize

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  Layer 1 robustness: learning how to do Network UPS Tools (NUT) properly here with an Eaton 3S. 2nd BeagleBone Black, powered from a powered USB hub, plugged into the BBB itself. Thence, an FTDI serial cable plugged into the hub, to the primary FreeBSD dev system. The UPS itself, repatched to the BBB via the hub. So 3 things are on the 3 BS1363 mains sockets on the Eaton UPS: the FreeBSD box, the BBB via the hub, and the FS S3900 switch they're both connected to. https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-g...

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  There is no "Singularity". If you believe this, you are a fool. Desperation camouflaged by utter science fiction tripe begets only the response: Sam Altman needs to get his fucking shine box, his desperation to IPO to externalize the "AI" con grows every day. Same with Mark Zuckerberg committing material falsehood in his WSJ op-ed this week. The manchild-CEO-for-life needs to get his shine box. Mark Shuttleworth, ignoring his user base: Shine box for you too. https://www.y...

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  Please heed Dijkstra's wisdom nearly 50 years after he spoke the words: "...after careful consideration I concluded that the intellectual challenge presented by the programming task is, indeed, as unprecedented as the high-speed automatic computer itself. And it had caused in my mind a shift of attention from "how to discover the unexpected" towards "how to avoid unmastered complexity", towards "how to reduce the demands made on our quantitatively limited powers...

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  LowEndBox author on "The Economics of AI and Why Cost-Conscious Companies Hate It"; basically, no demonstrable ROI, even when negative externalities are not taken into account. https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-economics-of-ai-and-why-cost-conscious-companies-hate-it/