I’m evaluating if FreeBSD can take the place of Debian on my production servers. Over the past month I’ve read several books, scoured forums and the FreeBSD handbook, and taken ample notes along the way. //

• The FreeBSD handbook provides great advice to use ssmtp for routing simple outgoing console/cron emails to yourself instead of setting up big, bulky, cranky postfix.

• Bash script opening shebangs need to be changed to #!/usr/bin/env bash to make them platform agnostic (they won’t run on FreeBSD if they are #!/bin/bash).

Bottom Line Up Front.

Or, in other words, make your point immediately, then follow up with only the most pertinent supporting information to help set context or tone. //

Why do we write the long way?

The type of writing we’re required to master in school trains us in the opposite direction. We’re raised to produce that longer, more verbose style. It’s also more polite and conversational, and as such is a more natural flow for many writers.

But it’s not the most efficient way to convey this sort of information. //

It’s unlikely that publishers would even consider changing to this format, but it’s been an interesting exercise to think about. It’s certainly a wish of mine that these books were written in a format that was more efficient to consume.

FAMP stack? That’s FreeBSD + Apache + MariaDB + PHP.

Here’s the steps necessary to build an Apache web server with MariaDB on FreeBSD.

You’ve probably heard talk about how building servers is outdated, inefficient, or even downright dangerous.

Virtualized, containerized, and serverless solutions definitely provide some benefits over legacy, server-based architecture. And there are many times where these solutions are truly ideal for delivering modern applications.

But at the end of the day, all of these containerized solutions are simply tools, VMs, or applications running on someone else’s server. Managed solutions can be a fantastic relief, but they can also be a major source of frustration since you’re removed from the inner workings of the platform.

There are many times where it’s beneficial – or even imperative – to operate your own server. For instance, if you’re running a home NAS, or if you have special hosting needs.

Building, operating, and maintaining your own server is a great way to improve your sysadmin skills and to learn deep, nuanced aspects of the systems you work with. //

The experiences I have had over the years have shaped me and given me different and unique perspectives, to the point where I’ve made a concerted effort to move away from Linux and towards FreeBSD for all of my production work. //

If you’re going to build your own servers, be a good steward. Take some steps to do it in a smart way:

• Write thorough documentation. Taking good notes not only reinforces your present learnings but helps your future self remember details about actions from the past.

The nature of our upcoming site theme refresh provided me with an interesting challenge. We’d need to be able to:

1. Keep the production site alive and in use during development.
2. Don’t enforce a content freeze on production during development.
3. Have a development site available for page building and review.

Not too tough a task…  I would just create the new taxonomies, and then hunker down and open each post, manually click the year and city, save, and move on to the next post.  But then this morning’s shower epiphany struck– I bet I could use wp cli to automate this whole project!

After about an hour of learning the (rather poorly documented) wp cli structure, I was able to come up with this process to automate the migration.  Here’s how I did it.

I was interested in trying out a service like OneDrive or Dropbox, but one thing always held me back: the idea that at any moment, and for any reason, the company could lock me out of my files.

The problem

No one wants to have their data held hostage by a third-party. How can you get the benefits of using cloud storage while also retaining ownership rights and having a level of assurance that your files will always be accessible?

The solution

Luckily, there’s a simple solution: Perform full backups of your cloud files in an environment that you control.

"Backup your data, you say?! What a novel idea!" /S

The setup

I use rclone to sync files from my cloud storage accounts to a VM running Alpine Linux. rclone works with over 40 cloud storage providers, has a very easy-to-use CLI, and works with modern authentication systems.

A cron job runs daily, pulling down any file changes into the backup.

I have the replication job set to exhaustively copy all files in the account to the local machine.

Secret #1: Five different things affect file permissions
No one just comes out and says it. I had to really delve into how things are set up to figure this out.

Otherwise, you’ll be stuck with files that get permissions that you swear you didn’t set. It will drive you insane. Once I started to see how all the parts worked together, it made more sense.

The five things controlling file permissions are:

1. Unix file and folder permissions
2. Samba share permissions
3. ZFS dataset permissions
4. ZFS ACL
5. umask

That’s right, five things! Crazy. Each of those things can affect the permissions of files and folders created in your Samba shares in Xigmanas. Before this weekend, I only knew about #1, #2, and #3, but #4 and #5 were little sneaky surprises.

Secret #2: You need to restart Samba after every change
When you change settings on your Samba shares in Xigmanas and then apply them, you’d expect the changes to take effect. After all, that’s how Xigmanas works for everything else. But, not here.

You must restart Samba after making changes, especially around permissions and inheritance, in order for them to take effect.

To do this, just go to Services > CIFS/SMB, then click the Save & Restart button at the bottom of the page.

Connect to your home or office devices from anywhere in the world using MeshCentral, the open source, remote monitoring and management server. Once installed, each enabled computer will show up in the "My Devices" section of the web site and will be able to perform remote desktop, remote terminal, file transfers and more. Get started by installing a MeshCentral server of your own or if you are not familiar with MeshCentral, you can try the public server at your own risk at MeshCentral.com. You can install your own server on Linux or Windows, it will run on anything from a large cloud instance to a Raspberry Pi.

MeshCentral Tutorial Videos
MeshCentral now has it's own YouTube channel with plenty of tutorials.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWz607A8EVlkilzcrb-GKg/videos

Do you know the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Hamas, a terrorist group backed by Iran, recently launched a brutal attack on Israeli civilians. As lies and misinformation spread across the Internet and the media, it’s critical that you know the truth about Israel and the Middle East conflict.

Why do fairy tales and fantasies grip us so? Why do they have such staying power? //

Fantasy takes spiritual realities and makes them physical. Nowhere besides fantasy (at least traditional fantasy) can we find in such a clear-cut manner the difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, honor and ignominy. The villains in fantasy, such as a dragon or a dark sorcerer, are embodiments of evil itself. Traditionally, they are not complex characters with conflicting motivations. They are evil, pure and simple, because they stand for forces that are utterly corrupt, such as sin, temptation, or the demonic. True fantasy is highly moral in character.

This is not to say that fairy tales are, necessarily, mere allegory. And, in fact, I think the best ones are not. The two great fantasy masters, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, took differing approaches to this issue. Lewis’s fiction was marked by obvious parallels to Christianity, while Tolkien intentionally avoided allegory in his writing, though he did call “The Lord of the Rings” a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”

I think a better term than allegory is perhaps “echo.” Fantasy echoes and dramatizes the spiritual and moral struggles that all of us face in life. Monsters and spells, quests and true love—these things are real, perhaps the most real things in life. Each of us fights monsters: depression, poverty, illness, our own sins, injustice, loss, the daily grind, whatever it may be. Each of us encounters spells (both good and bad): the pull of a drug, the enchantment of music, the stillness of a softly settling evening, and the mysterious processes and powers of nature. Each of us faces desperate quests: the career we are chasing, the people we are trying to save, the person we are trying to become—and there are countless dangers that could draw us away from our quests. And there is love. We may not be able to bring a princess back to life through a kiss, but we can raise someone out of despair by showing them our love and kindness. Heroes are no fantasy. //

C.S. Lewis put it this way in a letter to Miss Matthews: “I’ve never met Orcs or Ents or Elves-but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me.” //

As an example, writer K.M. Weiland recently mused on the power of Tolkien’s epic, “The Lord of the Rings” to take you “there and back again”—meaning, to bring the reader into the abyss of despair, and then draw him or her out again by restoring hope. Indeed, the trilogy is very much a book about despair, and yet it does not end despairingly. That is part of its immense power, and the power of all the best fantasy literature. This is the point that Tolkien himself makes towards the end of his essay “On Fairy Stories.” I will let the master speak for himself and conclude this essay:

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist,’ nor ‘fugitive.’ In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

In what could possibly be a major revelation related to the J6 riot at the U.S. Capitol building, a recent report suggests that Capitol Police fired rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd of Trump supporters during the incident. If true, this development raises serious questions about the potential role of law enforcement in the escalation of violence on that day.

Complaint: “Media Matters knowingly and maliciously manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers’ posts on X Corp.’s social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform. Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”

cupera1 pinkunicorns
3 hours ago
For those that want to return to a world that runs totally on green, like it was centuries ago, be careful about what you wish for. Wood was used for heating and cooking; charcoal for smelting and blacksmithing; wind or waterpower for pumps, mills, and sail ships for transport; and whale oil for lamps. People and soldiers walked or rode horses and the manure that dropped on the streets dried and blew into people’s lungs and was a lot more harmful than asbestoses ever was. The smoke from open fires choked and blackened cities. This smoke from wood and dried manure would make the smog of LA look like a clear day after a rain. The forests were stripped of trees; most of the crops went to feed draft animals.

For 99.999% of the people, life was nasty, brutish and short. You would be old and worn out at 40 and dead by 50. People would be laboring 18 hours a day from before the snow starts to melt to well after snow starts to build up in the fields, then you hope you have wood to make it through the winter and enough food to last until the next harvest.

Selected in
Nature
Unsplash Awards 2023

Artificial intelligence will change so many aspects of society, largely in ways that we cannot conceive of yet. Democracy, and the systems of governance that surround it, will be no exception. In this short essay, I want to move beyond the “AI-generated disinformation” trope and speculate on some of the ways AI will change how democracy functions—in both large and small ways.

When I survey how artificial intelligence might upend different aspects of modern society, democracy included, I look at four different dimensions of change: speed, scale, scope, and sophistication. Look for places where changes in degree result in changes of kind. Those are where the societal upheavals will happen.

Some items on my list are still speculative, but none require science-fictional levels of technological advance. And we can see the first stages of many of them today. When reading about the successes and failures of AI systems, it’s important to differentiate between the fundamental limitations of AI as a technology, and the practical limitations of AI systems in the fall of 2023. Advances are happening quickly, and the impossible is becoming the routine. We don’t know how long this will continue, but my bet is on continued major technological advances in the coming years. Which means it’s going to be a wild ride. ///

A lot of these could be good or bad, depending on the neutrality of those creating the A/I software and LLM. It would be very easy to use the control of the A/I software to mold society to fit the worldview and desires of one segment of society. //

Clive Robinson • November 13, 2023 12:37 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

“I stress the importance of separating the specific AI chatbot technologies in November of 2023 with AI’s technological possibilities in general.”

Firstly current AI, LLM’s are little more than DSP “Matched filters” driven by a shaped noise signal. The ML is little more than DSP “adaptive filtering” which all to often turns out to be a multiband integration of the noise spectrum.

There is no sign of “I” artificial or not, you can write down very basic equations that both LLM’s and the ML addatives can be adiquately described by. Even the nonlinearity and rounding errors that come up due to limitations can be reproduced as equations.

But for all the brouhaha of marketing hype and nonsense it does not take long to find out that these so called artificial neural networks, do not in any real way behave like biological neural networks, and as such fail at massive scale and energy input to do what biological networks do simply and efficiently.

I hope people by now realise that whilst LLM’s can patten match by correlation, they can not even do simple reasoning reliably or effectively. Thus they are going to fail miserably as “teachers” for learning much as the old “Smack it in by rote” teaching methods that were thoroughly debunked something like fourty years back from the start of this millennium.

If neither LLMs or their argument of ML can reliably reason, just pattern match to existing data sets plus noise, what are they realy orher than overhyped over priced near usless toys running around a historical track.

In short they are stuck in a faux past and very poor present, and can not move forward…

If you must anthropomorphize LLM’s and ML, they are effectively as daft as those who look back a century or a half ago and think it was all wonderful because their cognative blindness makes them think that they would have been at the top of things… Some what worse in fact than the stories of the Walter Mitty character who’s fantasies were just about being a manly hero.

Winter • November 13, 2023 12:52 PM

@Clive

Firstly current AI, LLM’s are little more than DSP “Matched filters” driven by a shaped noise signal.

Even though it is “literally” true, it still is utter nonsense.

It is claiming viruses are dead heaps of polymerized amino acids and nucleotides that can never imitate real life. That is true, taken literally, but they are nevertheless one of the most potent entities shaping life on earth, regularly remodeling human demographics on continental scales.

An LLM produces output that condenses orders of magnitude more text and speech than any human has seen in their life. The results are very useful, as anyone who writes texts can attest.

Maybe you are expecting the TRUTH. You will not get that from a machine. But human can do well with less than the TRUTH. And LLMs are delivering useful results even now. //

JonKnowsNothing • November 14, 2023 12:41 PM

@Anonymous

re: behind every major AI decision, we should have a human who makes the call

• Loophole #1 major AI decision

For AI there is not such thing as “major or minor”. These are qualitative human values. They do not exist in the giant scrabble bag of AI datasets

• Loophole #2 human makes the call

So, which human gets to do this? Which committee? Which government?

On what basis will a human make the call? Based on what the AI barfs up on the scrabble board of the dataset content?

How will the human know that the AI is not hallucinating?

AI is vastly different than other metering systems. Older metering systems are deterministic: they give the same results every time.

• Drop a coin (now a credit card) into the parking meter which gives N-minutes of ticket-free parking

AI gives different answers every time. The data set mutates. There is no fixed base. There is no measurable accuracy.

• Drop a coin (now a credit card) into the parking meter and AI generates Instant Ticket. Funds auto-deducted from your credit card. No refunds. No receipt. No redress. No proof.

It’s laudable that a human should vet the AI but there is no longer any verifiable authority on any topic. Ours is the last generation to know Before AI. We can know about the hallucinations but those behind us will never know.

• Elvis has left the building.

They do not know who Elvis was or why he left the building; neither does AI.

Size: 24 x 36 inches on sturdy cardstock
Description: This colorful, easy-to-read poster shows the family tree of every major Christian denomination.
ISBN: 978-0-7753519-3-1

For those unfamiliar with William Shakespeare’s masterpiece, King Lear is about an old British king who decides to leave his kingdom to his two older daughters. Lear’s older daughters flatter him while he repudiates and disowns his youngest daughter because she tells him the truth. Sure enough, the older daughters quickly seize their inheritance and kick their father out, leaving him to wander the countryside with his court jester. As this happens, the daughter whom he rejected works to save him despite his former behavior.

Something similar is happening with Francis, an old and distinguished monarch who has surrounded himself with shameless yes-men. These advisers are inept ideologues with ample personal baggage. They have absolutely no clue how to address any of the challenges facing today’s Christians. Sadly, Francis evidently prefers the sweet nothings of his circle to the harsh truths of men like Strickland. His circle has kept him safely insulated from reality for years now. This fact was recently revealed in his bizarre rant on priests acting like dandies.

Just as Lear and his kingdom could only be saved by the daughter he spurned, Francis and his church can only be saved by Catholics who remain loyal despite it all.

Most Catholics, if they are paying attention, can see that the Catholic left’s supposed victories will soon evaporate. They will pass away with the Boomer generation. Francis is 86, and the average cardinal is in his early 70s.

Waiting in the wings are much more conservative clergy ready to swing the ideological pendulum the other way. According to a recent report from the Catholic News Agency, “a full 85% of the youngest cohort describes itself as ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox’ theologically. Only 14 percent described themselves as “middle-of-the-road.” //

Thus, for the foreseeable future, the best thing Catholics can do is to exercise the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Our king is out in the wilderness, and his evil daughters are in charge, making a mess of things. Moreover, his advanced age has not made him wise but has only caused him to double down on his folly.

More footage from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, further contradicts the left-wing narrative that the day’s events constituted a “violent insurrection” wherein democracy itself was placed in jeopardy at the hands of virulent demonstrators. //

Michael Tracey @mtracey
·
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful

This video, suppressed for almost 3 years, confirms it
0:00 / 1:15
6:00 AM · Nov 18, 2023 -- https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1725831246603800650