zenoprax

I first noticed when I couldn't update an AUR package that pointed to their Forgejo instance. It turns out there was a multi-disk failure that has caused corruption of some kind.

> So currently the situation went from bad to horrible. We did suffered from both drives actually failing which makes the situation more dangerous.

> To make things worse, as some of you know since Tuesday @muppeth has been dealing with a personal tragedy which makes the entire process of recovering for the issue that much more difficult.

> On Tuesday my father passed away. This is a critical and heavy times for me but I must divide my time between my IRL and digital family. I will do all I can to bring back the storage as soon as possible. All I can ask for is your patience.

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Truly a rough position to be in. There are times when dumping other responsibilities in a crisis is trivial but I have also found myself overly concerned with trivial matters as a way of exerting control over something.

On the tech side of thing I can't imagine offering services to people without well-tested offsite backups and a bus factor of >1. I respect what they are trying to do and hopefully they can find a more resilient way of operating in the future.

This is my experience as well. I have spent many hours trying to eliminate this kind of contamination and the only solution I've found is to re-write from scratch every time. If the result isn't to your liking just reset its context and provide a more detailed prompt.

My thoughts exactly.

I recently experimented with some image generation models and I was surprised at how much context/prompting is needed to get something that doesn't look Lovecraftian. There was seemingly no downside to adding more and more detail up to the limit. Prose sits between code and images in terms of fuzziness and I wonder if promptmaxxing is the winning strategy for technical documentation.

I've been thinking that fine-tuning a model to write differently shouldn't be that hard (tedious, perhaps) and if I had the resources I would consider doing it myself.

Do you have any experience with multi-node operation with Incus? I like the simplicity of Proxmox for moving VMs and LXCs around but I haven't settled on a solution for OCI. K3S is an option but it's a big jump. I'm moving towards Fedora CoreOS VMs at the moment for live migration and security isolation.

What is your workload?

I briefly tried GLM 5.3 Flash and the first thing I noticed was how slow it was followed quickly by its single-mindedness. With DS 4.1 Flash I find that it understands that not all the detail in my prompt is important. Sometimes I like to give a quick example of what I'm looking for and it can take the hint whereas GLM will seemingly reshape its worldview around this tiny detail.

DS just handles ambiguity and my bursts of detail with much more grace. I'm only using "max effort" and the CoT is reasonable compared to GLM.

Air-gapped Dropbox for a pre-rsync, pre-ssh world.

The timeless debate of separating art from the artist.

In another project (literally: "Untitled") of theirs they are explicit about motivation:

> This is to fight against the trend of crappy github-powered websites that plague the internet.

"We don't want your passwords."

https://tailscale.com/blog/passkeys

Maybe running your own OpenID service would work?

https://openid.net/developers/how-connect-works/

Too much work though. Easier to just switch to Nebula or Netbird and self-host the full stack.

I looked into kata but it doesn't support Podman (my preferred baseline). I assume that touching a kernel requires some sort of rootful interface but I don't know enough about how seccomp and the other layers interact to know if it's the right balance.

gVisor felt a bit more "hacky" initially (at least compared to krun) but I will look into it a bit more as I saw someone else integrating it into their own setup.

My goal is to get 80% of the isolation for 20% inconvenience. Right now it feels like I'm getting 30-50% isolation for 10% inconvenience — I'm willing to tolerate a bit more friction if I can get a bigger jump in security.

It depends on your threat model but I think it's a good reminder either way. I recently discovered SmolVM <https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm> and it looks like a pretty good sweet spot for usability and isolation. There are so many sandboxing technologies to pick from and understand.

I've been using (rootless) Podman which gives me some basic assurances that it will stay in its designated directory and not run tools on my system directly but I have no limits on the network and with an internal UID/GID of 0:0 I have not done myself any favours. This is the same level of protection one would implement to keep a poorly written bash script from wreaking havoc and that's about it.

Some really unexpected domain redirects for this one for some reason: https://www.cssbed.com/vanillacss

All the others are as you'd expect.

I was just testing this and it's not clear that it works out of the box. `krun` shows a different kernel than with `crun` but it doesn't reflect the dropped capabilities in the same way. I'm probably holding it wrong but I'm not sure what to look for at the moment.

This makes sense to me but if I continue with the "fancy testing" analogy it seems like there is no accounting for interactions beyond the system itself: it has perfect unit and integration testing but only for a myopic amount of global state.

I am curious about the limits of what one can expect this language to solve and therefore the types of programs/domains to which it is more/less suited. Why is determining quorum the canonical use case?

Ah, I see what you're getting at. Reminds me of Keybase. It's mostly just a messaging app now but there was some similar efforts made 10+ years ago:

https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-new-key-model

https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

> In a distributed/p2p system with social interaction you need well defined identities that carries public keys. If you want to work offline, you actually need a full self-certified history of public key updates.

I don't understand how this is a problem. Isn't this already solved with keyservers and importing to a local keyring? My Linux distro has no problem keeping track of who is who and if they are trusted (not updating for a year or two would probably break things).

> so that you can backtrack to which pubkey(s) was active at the moment

I think GitHub solves this by simply checking at the time of the push and then never again (which is why you can change the keys without de-verifying older commits. Doesn't git's design yield blockchain-like assurance that nothing in the past has been modified?

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https://web.plc.directory/ looks interesting, never heard of it.

Personally, I think signed commits should be the default. This is especially true in the age of AI where distinguishing humans from machines becomes harder every day. I would love for encrypted email/IM and sharing keys to be the norm for everyone but we're not there and may never be.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Email to [email protected] will reach me (reply will be from my real email).

Is your Forgejo+AUR workflow available? I'm looking to do the same (plus Vagrant and OCI images). Getting a headstart on hardening would be a boon.

> "What happens when requirements change inside the launch window?" > "The alert fired but..."

In the running example I think it is clear that you could stop at any point and address the problem from that point rather than continuing. Questions such as "Why do we permit last minute changes at all?" are given no space.

In a complex system sometimes there is no root cause (cf. aviation crash investigations and the Swiss Cheese nature of risk). By allowing one person to shoulder the entire context of the incident and for that person be the one to suggest lasting corrective actions it leaves little need for the VP to even be involved. How would they know if the proposed corrections are worth the time and money to implement? I don't see any leadership in the example described in the article - I just see a knee-jerk reaction rather than any kind of proactive reflection.

> "I thought we fixed this last time!?"

> "This time was different in a way that our corrective actions didn't address."

I tried to make the GH Wiki work and managed to address 6 of the 7 concerns brought up in the article using a GH Action to mirror a directory of docs. It was my first GH Action and proved to be trickier than I thought. For those who just need to expose some markdown and don't want to bother with gh-pages you might find it useful:

https://github.com/super-productivity/super-productivity/blo...

The generic-ness of the wiki wasn't an issue for me as I only intended on using it as a temporary measure to build up the bulk of the content and coordinate with the main dev on finding a balance between the flashy website with its guides and the less flashy docs. gh-pages is the obvious next step of course.

Thanks. I think it's probably more complicated than I need at the moment but good to know it is an option down the road!

Can you explain a bit more about the boundary between the environment and my system? Is it just giving read-only access to /usr/lib?

I use an alias to launch a Podman container with opencode in $PWD. It is fully ephemeral aside from the directories I map to it (usually a couple configs). XDG_HOME is local to that working dir. My only frustration is that my image is too minimal but that can be resolved.

Yeah, I just use the "netinstaller" ISOs since it's much smaller and never needs to be updated. If I had a need for air-gapped/offline installs I'd either download a larger ISO or just manually install packages from .deb as needed.

Yes, models are a good use for P2P especially if everyone agrees to share the same torrent and someone (or a cohort) commit to seeding for the long haul.

Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on.

You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version.

Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.

You only need one person/organization to commit to seeding. The majority of people do not want to seed at all without some sort of incentive.

If this site represents a coordinated datahoarding effort then there will be at least a few people who will seed indefinitely.

I have three identical Lenovo SFF PCs with a U.2 SSD in each. I'm currently running them in a Ceph cluster but I'll be tearing that down soon. I could run some benchmarks with three in one box and report back? Would be a one-time thing rather than an on-going commitment though.

Disregard, I just saw you have some RAID10 tests in there so three SSDs won't be enough.

Wow, I had no idea. This is probably going to do the trick nicely. I really appreciate the suggestion and link!

I've been trying to find a solution for this too! I was considering using Rclone but too many things are using SQLite for me to trust rsync. I was also going to go with CoreOS but I'm leaning towards Fedora Cloud now in case I need to manage things a bit more (and "auto updating" is not something I want as that suggests auto rebooting).

Your secrets.yaml makes me nervous though - too easy to miss a key and leave something exposed. Why not just add the whole file to the vault?