napkin

Sol 6.1 was released two weeks ago!

This is me. I’ve gamified it to the extent that, to control my passion, I play tricks to ensure that the right thing becomes the wrong thing. My brain must believe it is procrastinating.

For example, I often don’t pay my bills (the money isn’t the issue). I have to have sufficient debts that they become convincing boogeymen. Work can’t feel like escape if there’s nothing to escape from.

Fool here. What’s the small bit of research I need to do?

I burst into laughter after hitting reply and seeing the same message character for character

))<>((

Things are complicated. As a policy, I wouldn’t want to encourage grandma to be going to any web site to download software. Grandma should probably stick to the App Store. And personally, I would way rather install github builds than downloads from ‘official’/independently maintained web sites. Especially in the case of free / open source projects, sometimes cash constrained. Security is hard.

I’m not super knowledgeable about modern video players- I do like Infuse, which is in the App Store.

When prompting an LLM service to leak the system prompt, how do you have the faintest idea as to its accuracy?

I‘ve read people say it‘s a difficult challenge for the providers. But aren‘t there some pretty basic strategies? E.g., code pretty near the front of the stack that just does some fuzzy string comparison on all output? They don‘t need to rely on just model behavior…

I imagine it‘s likely that the model is just doing what it‘s good at? Hallucinating a prompt?

The author recommends this add-on- “Auto Tab Discard”- apparently optimising tab memory management. Why wouldn’t the standard distribution adopt it?

I’m reminded of when I used to maintain an epic-sized vimrc, compiled my kernel for a different IO scheduler, etc. The plight of the “power-user” is walking a fine line between tool refinement and over-complication (which in my case can stem from procrastination).

There are many reasons to strive for a minimalist setup, main one being that setting everything up from scratch shouldn’t feel exhausting.

That said… Firefox, with just uBO and a few basic privacy settings tightened, is pretty great.

Yeah, not arguing the legal specifics. It’s good for Apple to be challenged in court.

But Epic did go out of their way to ‘trash’ Apple in the press. For this and other reasons I can’t generally relate to Epic. (e.g. targeting kids with microtransactions, burning piles of money on Epic Games exclusives.)

I would also not want to do business with Epic

But you’ve left out part of the narrative: Developer pushes an App update which purposefully violates the TOS, expecting rejection- having planned in advance to kick off an expensive PR campaign and legal battle.

I don’t deny Apple’s pettiness… Nonetheless, can you provide a different example of why devs are afraid of publicly criticizing Apple?

This all doesn’t sound worth reading into. There are other interpretations to supplier leaks. Ditto re: execs moving between teams. Apple AR != Vision Pro. On the flip side Apple is still shipping updates, new content, and selling units. I’ll just wait and see.

Is there evidence Vision Pro production was ‘cancelled’ as opposed to just running its limited course as planned? Are there substantial leaks indicating its successor has been cancelled?

The Silk Road represented a tiny fraction of illicit drug revenue per country. Some report-skimming would indicate less than a single digit. A series of more profit-oriented darknet markets replaced it. I don’t know what the costs were associated with its takedown but they must have been enormous. I doubt it became large enough for cartels to care much, but the effect of shutting it down is certainly good for them.

I don’t personally hold the opinion that Ross Ulbricht shouldn’t have been pursued according to the law- or support his pardon- or even that darknet drug markets should exist! I’m also not really interested in crypto.

However I strongly believe that a completely different approach to drug laws & regulations is necessary to make people safer and reduce crime.

You really cannot stop illicit drug use. A hard approach to prohibition not only makes people less safe, it’s a massive waste of spending. On just a pragmatic level- Fentanyl and analogues are by weight hundreds of times more potent than morphine. How do you even effectively stop that from getting across borders? Silk Road provided a brief counterpoint, and ideally wouldn’t have had to exist. The ideals it represented were more broad- for drug regulations/spending that focus on safety, and respect individual rights / bodily autonomy (ofc limited to not harming or endangering others).

(SWIM’s experience with Silk Road):

For LSD there existed a third-party forum, where a group of (supposedly) vendor-neutral, unaffiliated individuals would purchase samples from vendors, send them to private or state-sponsored labs around the world and publish/discuss the results (often with online links to lab results).

Yes, of course vendors could have also attempted to infiltrate these forums. But as enough of these functions were provided by/for the community, the profit incentive tilts. If you ran a vendor account on the Silk Road, your effort was better spent maintaining/improving good infosec and mail/postal security. Some techniques they developed were quite innovative, the professionalism was evident.

Ross’s story is fascinating and tragic- as everything that’s said for and against his character is generally true. Silk Road was built on naive yet admirable ideals. It fostered a special community, some of which really did reflect those ideals. He got in over his head, and really did try to have someone killed.

Though, the details on that latter point are a bit more complicated- authorities had infiltrated Ross’s inner circle- the motive and the ‘hitman’ himself were fictional. Ross still took the bait though, which is pretty damning. Until that point, they weren’t sure they had a sufficient case on him.

“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.“ (* deleted tweet by Netanyahu)

https://web.archive.org/web/20231017165958/https://twitter.c...

Top-down messaging like that certainly doesn’t strengthen whatever ‘policy’ is

I’ve been maining an M4 iPad Pro for a few months now since frying my laptop (which ran Linux) while travelling. There’s a lot to love about it.

Sadly, one discovers dozens of minor bugs and annoyances, that are mostly specific to doing productivity/dev work.

For example, when I use Cmd-Tab to switch tasks, there’s a ~ 1/20 chance that the Cmd key will become ‘soft-stuck’. That is, I’ll start typing and the OS will act as if I’m holding down Cmd, often messing with my browser or active project. I have to tap Cmd again to ‘unstick’ it. It’s not a hardware issue- An Apple store has already replaced the keyboard for me, and the problem persists.

I guess no one at Apple dogfoods the iPad for productivity? Which is sad, because here this thing is! It exists! Productivity features have been at least added to iOS!

On the plus-side, I’m getting deep into doing sound synthesis / music production in iOS. The ecosystem is kind of exciting. I spend most of my time inside Audulus (Max/PD-like data flow/DSP) - it is criminally underrated, and so much fun.

I could really go on about the pros and cons but will refrain. It’s just such a mixed bag.

I primarily use an iPad pro. Hardware-wise, I think it’s a superior paradigm. Most of the time I’m using it with the magic keyboard. I love that if the keyboard is damaged, it’s totally removed from the device.

We don’t need to talk about the OS!

A less finnicky approach would be binding to 0.0.0.0, then configuring incoming firewall policy. By default deny, then allow SSH through wireguard network. Or by default allow then deny SSH through public network.

Sure, you wouldn’t call the Steam Deck a Desktop. However as you pick apart its software stack, you’d be hard pressed to find a few parts that don’t also benefit the Desktop usecase. Valve delivered a device that mostly just works for gaming, and the improvements they’ve invested in also benefit Desktop users. I don’t own a Steam Deck, but I am a decades-long Linux desktop user, and Valve‘s success thrills me.

Btw I take screenshots often w gnome+wayland, it just works so I don’t even know how it’s implemented. Not sure if you were making a Wayland jab.

The argument that it is ‘screwing desktop Linux’s progress’ doesn’t hold well in light of the success of the Steam deck- selling to millions- and running a Wayland compositor. Which ‘non-wayland’ efforts have been thwarted, that had any such numbers?

Wish I could say it was more sophisticated than slow trial and error. I tried changing many different aspects: MTU, forcing different routes/peering through different VPSs, various reverse proxy configurations.

I guess what started leading me down the right path was a more methodical approach to benchmarking different legs of the route with iperf: Client <-> reverse proxy, reverse proxy <-> jellyfin server. I started testing those legs separately, w/ and w/o Wireguard, both TCP and UDP. The results showed that the problem exhibited at the host level (nothing to do with Jellyfin or the reverse proxy), only for high latency TCP. The discrepencies between TCP and UDP were weird enough that I started researching Linux sysctl networking tuneables.

There might be something smart to say about the general challenges of achieving stable high throughput over high-latency TCP connections, but I don't have the knowledge to articulate it.

I had this problem too! Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy over Wireguard. For intercontinental visitors (high latency), there would be an initial burst of reasonable transfer speed, but within seconds, slow to an unusable crawl. It took a long time to identify the problem as relating to packet congestion.

Try changing Linux's default congestion control (net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control) on your Jellyfin & reverse proxy servers to 'bbr'. I don't understand the details- there might be negative consequences [1]- there might be better congestion algos- but for me, this completely solved the issue. Before, connections would stall out to <10%, sometimes even 1% line rate. In quiet/optimal network conditions.

Also, Caddy enables HTTP/3 by default. I force it to HTTP/2.

I should probably investigate using later versions of bbr, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408406

I’m currently using xtts2 to make language learning more exciting, by training models on speakers I wish to emulate. I’m really into voices, and this has helped tremendously for motivation when learning German.

The circumstances around this particular crisis are spiritually difficult to process. I'm cynical, but not cynical enough to have imagined the political alignment that we currently ('the west') hold, to enable/allow this level of suffering to occur, in Gaza. When an _entire_ (state/state-less) population is displaced, facing famine, disease, with no functional infrastructure- is it not reasonable to suggest that historical/political differences of opinion around the conflict are not the pressing matter? That even the most cynical interpretation of the 'human shield' argument can not justify this level of collective suffering? That there are other options, least of which simply minimise suffering? Over a million people are lacking basic human needs. We could easily help but, for political reasons, do nothing.

Can you provide a URL to a page containing a link of this style? I’ll concede that it’s useful to someone if I see it! The term ‘FQDN’ does not always imply the dot at the end?

Curious. What is the use case here? I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours of my life on the Internet and a lot of that as a sysadm and I’ve not once heard of people accessing or linking to sites this way.

Yes. In a heartbeat. If only to support OpenWRT.

Since the demise of Soekris and PC Engines, I don't know of good alternatives. I'd like to be excited about newer ARM-based, power sipping routers- but which ones aren't so cheaply made? The aformentioned companies hit that sweet spot- a 2-3x cost premium for industrial quality and an open approach. They were devoted to hardware and wasted no energy on branded forks of OpenWRT.

I'm curious to try some Teltonika products like the RUT series. They seem sparsely documented on the OpenWRT wiki, though.

Curious to hear any Soekris/PC Engines fans experience with newer stuff.

Love this! Naive question: what kind of resolution do potentiometers like these provide? I took a look at the specs but I don't know how to interpret them. I'm curious why you would or wouldn't use high res rotary optical encoders (aside from $).

Yeah, that's what I was factoring. For my home, the 24/7 power consumption from a handful of switches + some kind of hub just balanced out the potential savings from having the same bulbs off more often.