SpaceCadet

joined 2 years ago
[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 points 2 days ago

Especially since memory training on DDR5 can take upwards of a minute.

Just FYI: most bioses have a setting to save the memory training, so it doesn't have to be re-done each boot. On an Asus board it's called "Memory Context Restore".

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 points 9 months ago

You don't need Iran to prove that. Women's rights have already been rolled back in the US, it's a mistake to assume it will stop here.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In many cases there’s no extra wear

You can't change physics. More HP = more torque = more wear on the whole drive train. Also more boost = more stress on the turbo = it will fail sooner.

Also, back then, cars with the higher specced variant of the "same" engine almost always had mechanical upgrades compared to the lower specced engine: usually bigger brakes, a stronger clutch, and various other drive train components.

So while in many cases you could chip your car without much immediate harm, you were definitely cutting into various safety margins determined by automotive engineers who know much better than you and me.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Guys this content was by boomers for boomers

Tom's Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original "Tom", Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.

The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

DNS does nothing for youtube.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago

I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as "WE HAVE AI NOW!", and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that's what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn't help either.

And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... so people assume it is a duck, but they don't realize that it's a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 points 9 months ago

LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn't quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program's behavior a bit erratic, so that's why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I'm paraphrasing): oh to do "this specific thing" you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough... the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn't exist.

Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn't a valid one. This one wasn't completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago

That's another option, but it's a bit more cumbersome having to cherrypick which exact backports you need for your specific hardware. Also, if you then for some reason don't upgrade to the next stable release when it comes out, backports get abandoned after 1 year instead of the customary 3 years for the rest of the oldstable release.

From my experience, running trixie/testing the past year or so on a minipc with hardware that was a bit too recent for bookworm, I can say that the cadence of security patches has been about the same between bookworm and testing.

And let's be honest, on a desktop system your main attack surface is going to be the software you go online with, i.e. the browser. So if you make sure that is kept up to date (flatpak, vendor repo, ...) that already goes a long way.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 3 points 9 months ago

the ctrl-super-alt is completely different

It's not "completely different" ... and that's the problem. Completely different I can handle. I can manage knowing vim keybindings, readline keybindings and standard windows keybindings at the same time. What I can't handle is: having to use command + C on one Mac and control + C on Windows to copy, but then in some cases you do use "control" on both OS-es, and sometimes control and alt are switched ... It's because they are similar but different that it's such a mess trying to get proficient in both at the same time.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Eh. Windows has its share of annoyances, but once I have set it up to my liking my desktop workflow is very similar to my KDE setup, and WSL + Windows Terminal gives me a functional Linux shell environment.

And at least on Windows I don't have to deal with cmd/control/alt switcharoo messing up my muscle memory.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

The correct way with a new computer with recent hardware is to install Debian Testing to get a recent kernel, firmware and mesa and stuff, but put the code name of the next release into your apt config instead of "testing". So then when the next version is released, you can just stay on that, now stable, version.

Trixie just got released today though, so for the time being you can probably get away with using that.

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

every service will get your ID or photo

To be fair, that's not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn't get your identity.

Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.

1144
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by SpaceCadet@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
 

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

6
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by SpaceCadet@feddit.nl to c/debian@lemmy.ml
 

I have a small server in my closet which is running 4 Debian 12 virtual machines under kvm/libvirt. The virtual machines have been running fine for months. They have unattended-upgrades enabled, and I generally leave them alone. I only reboot them periodically, so that the latest kernel upgrades get applied.

All the machines have an LVM configuration. Generally it's a debian-vg volume group on /dev/vda for the operating system, which has been configured automatically by the installer, and a vgdata volume group on /dev/vdb for everything else. All file systems are simple ext4, so nothing fancy. (*)

A couple of days ago, one of the virtual machines didn't come up after a routine reboot and dumped me into a maintenance shell. It complained that it couldn't mount filesystems that were on vgdata. First I tried simply rebooting the machine, but it kept dumping me into maintenance. Investigating a bit deeper, I noticed that vgdata and the block device /dev/vdb were detected but the volume group was inactive, and none of the logical volumes were found. I ran vgchange -a y vgdata and that brought it back online. After several test reboots, the problem didn't reoccur, so it seemed to be fixed permanently.

I was willing to write it off as a glitch, but then a day later I rebooted one of the other virtual machines, and it also dumped me into maintenance with the same error on its vgdata. Again, running vgchange -y vgdata fixed the problem. I think two times in two days the same error with different virtual machines is not a coincidence, so something is going on here, but I can't figure out what.

I looked at the host logs, but I didn't find anything suspicious that could indicate a hardware error for example. I should also mention that the virtual disks of both machines live on entirely different physical disks: VM1 is on an HDD and VM2 on an SSD.

I also checked if these VMs had been running kernel 6.1.64-1 with the recent ext4 corruption bug at any point, but this does not appear to be the case.

Below is an excerpt of the systemd journal on the failed boot of the second VM, with what I think are the relevant parts. Full pastebin of the log can be found here.

Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: PV /dev/vdb online, VG vgdata is complete.
Dec 16 14:40:35 omega lvm[307]: VG vgdata finished
...
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start timed out.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device - /dev/vgdata/lvbinaries.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for binaries.mount - /binaries.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for local-fs.target - Local File Systems.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Job local-fs.target/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: local-fs.target: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: binaries.mount: Job binaries.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvbinaries.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start timed out.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device dev-vgdata-lvdata.device - /dev/vgdata/lvdata.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: Dependency failed for data.mount - /data.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: data.mount: Job data.mount/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Dec 16 14:42:05 omega systemd[1]: dev-vgdata-lvdata.device: Job dev-vgdata-lvdata.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.

(*) For reference, the disk layout on the affected machine is as follows:

# lsblk 
NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
vda                   254:0    0   20G  0 disk 
├─vda1                254:1    0  487M  0 part /boot
├─vda2                254:2    0    1K  0 part 
└─vda5                254:5    0 19.5G  0 part 
  ├─debian--vg-root   253:2    0 18.6G  0 lvm  /
  └─debian--vg-swap_1 253:3    0  980M  0 lvm  [SWAP]
vdb                   254:16   0   50G  0 disk 
├─vgdata-lvbinaries   253:0    0   20G  0 lvm  /binaries
└─vgdata-lvdata       253:1    0   30G  0 lvm  /data

# vgs
  VG        #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  debian-vg   1   2   0 wz--n- <19.52g    0 
  vgdata      1   2   0 wz--n- <50.00g    0 

# pvs
  PV         VG        Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree
  /dev/vda5  debian-vg lvm2 a--  <19.52g    0 
  /dev/vdb   vgdata    lvm2 a--  <50.00g    0 

# lvs
  LV         VG        Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  root       debian-vg -wi-ao----  18.56g                                                    
  swap_1     debian-vg -wi-ao---- 980.00m                                                    
  lvbinaries vgdata    -wi-ao----  20.00g                                                    
  lvdata     vgdata    -wi-ao---- <30.00g 
view more: next ›