algernon

It was the night of December 24th, 1996. I turned on the family PC, then running Win95, and found my D:\ drive corrupted. Windows had no tools nor docs how to resurrect a corrupted filesystem. I cried, and two days later installed SuSE on a spare disk.

Some 20 years later, I restored about half of the disk lost in 1996, because Linux had the tools, and the docs, and encouraged me to learn.

I'm running Tang on a VPS, outside of my homelab. Servers in my homelab set up networking and a dedicated WireGuard tunnel to the VPS from initrd, to be able to talk to Tang, to help unlock the filesystem. The WireGuard tunnel is only allowed from my home ISP's ASN. So if anyone picks up all my equipment from my homelab and walks away with them, they will not be able to boot them up, unless they connect from my ISP's ASN (good luck), or know the passphrase.

Additionally, some of my homelab computers that support TPM also have a TPM pin, so walking away with the disk only, and connecting from my ISP's ASN would still not be enough. This is rather pointless, anyone who walks away with the disk only will likely take the entire computer instead. But it was fun setting it up.

In the not so distant future, I'll update this setup to use Shamir Secret Sharing more, where I'll have three pins: my VPS (via Wireguard), a small computer somewhere else in my apartment, and a third at a neighbour (+ TPM on supporting computers).

"As if openclaw and android had a baby", and that's a recommendation, not a warning? WTF.

No. I'm not dead yet.

Mostly on coffee, not exclusively. Noticable amounts of spite & tortilla chips are also present, yes, but... no shame.

Only when I'm deprived of coffee.

Yes. My Actual Intelligence lives in my head, and runs mostly on coffee.

I can do that, probably over the weekend.

It's for self-hosters, I'm afraid. The idea behind it is that your webserver / reverse proxy forwards all GET and HEAD requests to it, it does some heuristics and either returns a page filled with garbage your webserver/reverse proxy can serve, or a 421 (misdirected request) error code, at which point your webserver / reverse proxy can serve the real contents. So to run it, you need to be able to make it play nice with your webserver or reverse proxy, which pretty much means you'll have to self-host, yeah.

The garbage part is important, because that's how iocaine serves poisoned URLs (urls that have an identifiable substring), so if any of the crawlers come back, and manage to get through all other heuristics iocaine puts in front of them, if they land on a poisoned URL, they'll get caught anyway.

I've been drooling over the open tab ever since the Kickstarter went up. I have many keyboards from my firmware hacking days, but one with a keywell is missing from my collection. Sadly can't afford it, but it'll remain on my wishlist, so whenever that changes, whenever I'll be able to afford one, I will get one.

I'm not sure it would replace my Keyboardio Model 100 (the thumb key on that is just so incredibly useful), but it's the closest thing I've seen so far.

Good luck!

The best I can do against AI is prevent their crawlers from accessing my work. I've built iocaine for this purpose, and it's happily serving an infinite maze of poison to all the crawlers, and they ain't getting through. A number of other people and organizations also use it, and that gives me warm, fuzzy feelings.

I also wrote about surviving the crawlers, and helped a couple of friends have a li'l fun with them. That's actually quite fun.

I also helped our twins ween their teacher off of ChatGPT: she's otherwise a great teacher, but she's been using ChatGPT to give them homework. It had so many mistakes, typos! So they started to quietly correct the exercises with red pen, and handing the homework in, with the questions corrected too. Other kids saw that too, started doing the same. Then it spread to other classes. Two months later, none of the teachers use ChatGPT (or any other "AI") anymore, and the word of them being laughably crap spread to households that otherwise wouldn't be aware. New kid came to town, "you guys know about chatgpt?!" - he stopped talking about it by the end of the week.

Sometimes being openly, vocally very AI-hostile pays off. So I'm going to continue doing that.

Way back when in 2015, I assigned all my past and future copyrights to any contributions I made to Debian-owned projects (including any packaging work I made, etc) to the SFC, because our values aligned at the time, and it made sense. Following this post of theirs, I sent them an email asking them to reassign copyright back to me going forward.

I have not contributed to Debian in years, and the chance of me doing so in the foreseeable future is slim, but I could not stand and watch without sending a message.

I will continue to tell anyone who dares come close to my projects with an LLM to fuck off, and will ban them from any spaces I have control over. "AI" companies have caused immeasurable harm to FLOSS projects, not shunning them is ceding ground to them. And when you let them in, sooner or later, only they will remain.

I'll stick to people, thankyouverymuch.