melroy

53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.

Alex finally created his own channel together with Andy.

Besides his new tech Zip Tie Tech channel (please subscribe?): https://www.youtube.com/@zip/_tie/_tech

Alex & Andy are also into the car channel call Zip Tie Tech: https://www.youtube.com/@ZipTieTuning

Show him that we want more tech vids subscribe to their tech channel! I believe Alex and Andy are an awesome combo and people. I wish them the best..

EDIT: Jake from Tech Tips ALSO CREATED his own YoutTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jakkuh/_t

Safety evaluation of Claude Sonnet 4.5 raises questions about whether predecessors ‘played along’, firm says

I personally think this might be one of the first self awareness signs! This is actually pretty scary.

The German car-maker says its "optional power upgrade" is designed to give customers more choice.

The brand new Microsoft Edit, which is the successor of the old MS-DOS-editor will come soon to Linux as well?

There is a discussion going on how to call ms edit executable under Linux at: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/discussions/341

Microsoft Edit is fully written in Rust. And the source-code is actually fully open-source as well under MIT license 😮.

I personally would like see them calling it dos-edit or just dosedit, since that would be kinda funny. But I understand it will be called ms-edit instead.

I know Linux already has vi, vim, neovim and nano, ... and more... However is kind of ironic to see this binary be shipped to Linux distros. Of course it's already added to Arch btw: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ms-edit-git

Official GitHub page.

Generate context with up-to-date documentation for LLMs and AI code editors

Instead of an AI hallucinating about your favorite stack/code...
Context7 will add additional context (using MCP) to the editor and voila, no hallucination anymore! And always up to date!

Today I found out that Linux kernel v6.14 is released, which has NTSync shipped with it.

NTsync was actually released in the past as well, but broken... They fixed it in Linux kernel 6.14 now.

For those using Wine on Linux to play Windows games, this is great news! The new NTSync "driver" improves support for Windows locking mechanisms, allowing applications and games to handle higher workloads more efficiently under Wine.

I use Mainline Linux in order to install the latest Linux kernel (maybe another TIL for you?).

Anyhow, have fun! Some games can have over 670% performance improvements on FPS. Like DiRT 3 for example. That is crazy right?

Using another Linux scheduler called scx_bpfland, a scheduler its job to manage the load across multiple cores effectively. scx_bpfland is an alternative scheduler built on top of sched_ext.

Long story short, you can significantly improve Linux gaming by switching to another thread scheduler like scx_bpfland, which can improve the unstable 30 FPS (with spikes) to a very stable 60 FPS game play (video link).

I also would love to combine these scheduler with other features like CPU pinning. There is a Linux CLI tool called taskset, which seems to pin cores for processes.

In another unrelated software sidekiq, taskset was also used to improve performance due to CPU affinity which in result making the software so much faster.

Setting commit_delay = 300 (which is 300 microseconds) in PostgreSQL allows you to group write commits. And flush them by a single transaction.

This is in particularly useful if you have a lot of writes to the disk in a short time window, this will reduce the disk I/O bursts.

You could also set synchronous_commit = off as well. So there will not be a flush earlier than the specified wal_writer_delay. However, only turn this off, if your performance is more important than your data integrity. That being said, it will not cause corruptions, unlike the fsync setting (which I would strongly advise to NOT change, so keep fsync on the default setting).

And then we have wal_writer_delay. Which is the time in milliseconds how often the WAL gets flushed. This option only works when synchronous_commit if set to off!! You most likely do not need to increase the wal_writer_delay value (in fact, you might even want to lower this value).

Official docs: https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/commit_delay/

Settings to point out are in random order:

• https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/shared_buffers/
• https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/effective_io_concurrency/
• https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/max_worker_processes/
• https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/max_wal_size/ & https://postgresqlco.nf/doc/en/param/min_wal_size/

See more PostgreSQL fine-tuning at: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/610

By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024

Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.

Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.

“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.

Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.

They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.

The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.

By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.

Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.

“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2449198-smart-tvs-take-snapshots-of-what-you-watch-multiple-times-per-second/ (paywall!!)

My ipset hash is full!? I'm using Ubuntu Server and I created a separate fail2ban jail that uses "iptables-ipset-proto6-allports" as their ban action (thus using ipset instead of iptables).

However, today I seem to hit the limit: stderr: 'ipset v7.15: Hash is full, cannot add more elements'.

This can be confirmed by running the ipset -t list command:

Name: f2b-manual
Type: hash:ip
Revision: 5
Header: family inet hashsize 32768 maxelem 65536 timeout 0 bucketsize 12 initval 0xbc28aef1
Size in memory: 2605680
References: 1
Number of entries: 65571

Where the 65571 entries exceeds the maxelem (65536). So what now?? Could I create a banlist in a txt file or something? I just want to ban some large tech corps: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/619