vk6flab

vk6flab , 2 days ago

Are you turning it the right way?

I'm asking because I've seen circumstances where everyone was convinced that it needed to go one way, but many expensive hours later were proven to be wrong.

Also, is there something jammed in the pipe, like say roots or a snake?

vk6flab , 4 days ago

On a wing and a prayer striding off to the next free meal..

vk6flab , 7 days ago

The business model to require paid credits in order to interact with bots is in my opinion a thing of sheer bastardry.

Apparently, this is how it works: (*)

Women were on the site for free, men were required to pay for and use credits in order to interact with women.

It appears that there weren't anywhere near the numbers of women claimed by the company. Instead bots would communicate with men, using their credits in the process.

(*) I say works, because apparently the company still exists today and I'm not aware if they ever admitted to using bots, let alone discontinuing their use. The Netflix series goes into detail, which is where I got this understanding from.

Disclaimer: I'm not a customer, have never been one and my comments are based on a single source as described above.

vk6flab , 7 days ago

Thank you for your kind words.

I have been writing for most of my life. You can for example read (a copy of) the Alt.Best.Of.Internet FAQ I wrote in 1994. [1]

[1] https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles/aboi-faq

I tend to write how I speak and attempt to create enough context so a casual reader on the topic can come away with something whilst still discussing the complexity for someone more versed in the subject.

I have written articles about identity theft, authentication over the phone, as well as other technology issues relevant to the public at large. [2]

[3] https://github.com/ITmaze/articles

I also write a weekly article about the hobby of amateur radio and have done so for over 13 years. It's published as an audio podcast, with email, video and Morse code versions. [4]

[4] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

As for the suggestion of a TED talk, I've considered it, but haven't found a topic worthy of the platform.

As a radio amateur I publish using my callsign, VK6FLAB, as an IT professional, it's under my company, ITmaze.

Some other articles:

• https://www.itmaze.com.au/articles

vk6flab , 7 days ago

That's very kind.

You can hear my voice any time. [1]

[1] https://podcasts.vk6flab.com/

That said, I have stood on stage many times and if I could come up with a topic worthy of the TED talk platform I'd be game.

vk6flab , 6 days ago

I re-read it and loved the: "Always fasten your seatbelt on the Information Highway", but I'm fairly certain that Malinda McColl wrote it (as part of the mini FAQ on which I expanded with her blessing).

vk6flab , 6 days ago

Hey, I resemble that remark!

vk6flab , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

As it happens it's already on my radar.

That said, I'm not convinced that the YouTube video version is worthy of being transmitted on SSTV, given that it's a waterfall display of the audio.

vk6flab , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I absolutely love the question and I'm going to attempt to answer it in a way that is not a reminiscing by an "old" internet citizen, rather some of the magic and wonder that I have been fortunate enough to experience.

My first time really connecting to the Internet was in 1990. I didn't have my own account, so with permission I used the account that belonged to my boss at the time, Brian Murphy. He was a statistician and wine maker who had employed me to convert a statistics program (NANOVA) he wrote for a mainframe into something that could run on a desktop spreadsheet program that was new and exciting at the time, Wingz.

At the time the way "the Internet" worked was much more fragmented than the almost integrated experience we have today. Protocols (ways of getting information) like "telnet"[1], "ftp"[2] and "finger"[3] were how you got around, using programs that only knew how to do one thing. All of it was text-only. If you've heard of "gopher"[4], it didn't exist yet. The "Wide Area Information Server"[5] (WAIS), had only just been invented but hadn't made it to my desk.

You used text only email much like today, but addressing required that you knew how to get your message from your system to the recipient, using a so-called bang path [6] addressing scheme. This was not fun, but it got the job done. You could use tools like "finger" to determine how to get email to a person, which was a great help, but still was non-trivial. It's like putting an address on an envelope that says, send this message from Perth, to Kalgoorlie, then to Adelaide, then to Sydney, then to Ultimo, then to Harris Street, then to number 500.

Much simpler was to use "Usenet News"[7], a global messaging system where you connected to your local news server, participated in discussion, whilst behind the scenes your messages would be shared with other news servers which were doing the same.

So, I'm sitting at my desk in Brian's office with a brand new Apple Macintosh SE/30. This is leading edge hardware. I have a text-window open that is emulating a terminal (probably a VT220[8]), using telnet I'm connected to the local VAX cluster[9] that is running (among other things) our local news server.

I am not certain, but I think that this is my first ever message. It's 4 September 1990 and I'm having an issue with MPW Pascal and the piles of paper documentation surrounding me had no answers. There is no "Google" or anything like it at this point, so I had to find answers elsewhere.

I found the message in one of the "comp" groups[10], "comp.sys.mac.programmer", as opposed to an "alt" group[11] like alt.best.of.internet. These names are how you navigated the massive hierarchy of information that Usenet represents. Just like with domain names today, you specify the name by adding more dot names.

In today's terms this could be expressed as a Lemmy community or a Reddit sub. And just like with those today, each Usenet group was a community with its "in" jokes, people who knew what they were talking about and those who didn't, the whole enchilada.

Anyway, I posted to the group and asked a question about how to achieve the thing I wanted to fix. I went home and the next day I had a reply .. from Brazil, where they too had discovered this issue and had found a solution.

It .. blew .. my .. mind.

This started me on the journey I'm still on today. There is plenty more to tell to cover the 34 years since then. Perhaps a story for another day.

I debated providing links to some of the things I mention, but given that links didn't exist in 1990, finding information was HARD, I thought it would be a nice 'meta' joke to include them.

Today I am going to do something much more mundane, set-up a backup job for a virtual server that was cloned from an older system, running a web-site and database on a cloud provider platform that I can use and access as-if it's sitting on my desk while it is thousands of kilometres away. If my fingers were small enough, I could do this from my mobile phone.

So, yeah, things have changed.

o

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMScluster
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy

vk6flab , 16 days ago

The traditional way is to use a serial console from another device.

vk6flab , 16 days ago

Also, the word you're looking for is: "headless", as in, "headless install"

vk6flab , 17 days ago

What is it specifically about Linux that doesn't work for you?

I'm asking because I've been using it for almost a quarter of a century as my main desktop.

vk6flab , 8 days ago

I'm going to answer your points below. Not because I want to tell you to move to Linux, but because the information you state is incorrect. Linux is not for everybody. It works for millions of people and it works for me, but that doesn't mean it will be what you're looking for.

In order:

1. There are no .exe files. Neither are there any on MacOS, iOS, Android, or anything else that isn't Windows/DOS. To start software requires that it's on the search path in exactly the same way that Windows requires. You can see what that is with the command: echo $PATH. Most Linux distributions have a graphical user interface which features icons and menus, but if you don't want that, you don't need to install it.

2. You absolutely can, but it doesn't work the same way as Windows, because it's not Windows. You can for example login to Linux because the login manager started at system startup. You see a desktop after logging in because there's a startup system for your account. The printer works because the software driving the print queue is started.

3. Wine is a tool. It's not a replacement for Windows. It's not intended to be. It's intended to help users and developers make Windows software work better on Linux.

4. LibreOffice is one of many office suites. I have been using it as my productivity software for 25 years in my company and I'm not at all disappointed to have escaped the Microsoft Clippy, Ribbons, Office365 abominations.

5. I have used Libre Calc for most of my numerical analysis processes. I used real tools like R and gnuplot when I was analyzing terabytes of data.

6. The terminal is a tool. I use it daily. At any time there's a dozen of them open. Not everyone needs a terminal, but there are plenty of things that you can only do in a terminal. A random example, list all the files in your account, group them by extension, then add up how much space each extension takes. In case you're wondering:

find ~ -type f | egrep -o "\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$" | sort -u | LC_ALL=C xargs -I '%' find . -type f -name "*%" -exec du -ch {} + -exec echo % \; | egrep "^\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$|total$" | uniq | paste - -

Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/457241

Linux is not Windows. It never was and it never will be, neither is any other operating system. The community around Linux is helpful, the ecosystem is vibrant and it's free. If you want to pay for support, you can. If you don't, there's plenty of opportunity to do your own thing.

If you want it to be like Windows, you're going to be very disappointed.

vk6flab , 25 days ago

Consider the impact of donating to one or more clients as the main project.

• People donating did so to the main project, not a client.
• What happens if the donation goes to a client that you feel is unworthy for whatever reason.
• What happens if your preferred client doesn't get a donation?

vk6flab , 25 days ago

It's an interesting question.

Perhaps I'm not devious enough, but the only impact I can see is insurance companies increasing your fees or denying cover.

vk6flab , 27 days ago

It doesn't. I recall an experiment a few decades ago where they turned the world upside down. Didn't take participants long to "normalise" the image.

When they removed the experiment, took even shorter to flip back.

I seem to recall it being done in a train carriage, as art, but I'm not sure.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

You realise that this is because Microsoft spent billions of dollars on what amounts to a new version of "Clippy" and it's just as helpful as the original.

If you're unfamiliar with the abomination, it's a dumber version of Copilot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Yeah, "Microsoft helpful", not actually helpful.

vk6flab , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Are the people who work at OpenAI smoking crack?

“Over the last year and a half there have been a lot of questions around what might happen if influence operations use generative AI,” Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team, told members of the media in a press briefing

Here's a clue, look around you.

ChatGPT isn't the only fish in the sea and state actors using a public service like it deserve to be caught. Running your own system privately, without scrutiny, without censorship, without constraints is so trivial that teenagers are doing this on their laptops, so much so that you can docker pull your way into any number of LLM images.

Seriously, this is so many levels of absurd that it's beyond comprehension...

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Not just burnout, opportunism features with several users I've spoken with. The level of ignorance surrounding ChatGPT is staggering.

One egregious use I know of was a developer who used it to write software to analyse a government dataset despite their department having put in place specific and targeted restrictions specifically against any such activities.

Their workaround was to use their private email to exfiltrate data and subsequently introduce the code.

Their rationale was that it didn't harm anyone and their ICT department would vet any code. They were not concerned about this private data showing up on the ChatGPT public log, nor were they concerned about the accuracy of their code.

I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg and I think it's going to take a serious data breach of identifying information before people lose their jobs over this type of misuse.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

For a period the interactions you had with ChatGPT were public and a live stream was available.

At the time when I looked at it, there was an astonishing amount of non-english traffic, but that might have been due to the fact that my UTC+8 timezone in Perth is the same as mainland China.

I had a quick search just now to see if I could find a link, but all I can locate is posts about new privacy controls, so perhaps that "feature"went by the wayside at some point.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

I'm fairly certain that it was ChatGPT, but I'm going from memory. I have a hunch that I saw a Hacker News show and tell post.

Update: It was in my bookmarks.

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/89k-chatgpt-conversations

vk6flab , 1 month ago

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/noahpersaud/89k-chatgpt-conversations

vk6flab , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

So, after you build this Bat Roost, how do you tell the local bat population that you're open for business .. asking for .. a friend, purely for .. educational purposes.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

How many people are obviously wankers?

How many times have you seen glasses like this?

You do the math ..

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Actually, in my opinion, Xitter is the worst social media app for society, not just LGBTQ+ people.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Or you could point a flamethrower at the sensor..

For less drastic response, put your hand on the sensor.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

I'll build it, just as soon as you figure out how it gets paid for.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Yeah. No.

"Advertise your rental property on the page where your tenants review you."

vk6flab , 1 month ago

It's a lovely pattern to look out for, your efforts to show just how ugly it is, are welcome.

For anyone considering implementing this: No.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

The underlying issue with an LLM is that there is no "learning". The model itself doesn't dynamically change whilst it's being used.

This article sets out a process that gives the ability to alter the model, by "dialling up" (or down) concepts. In other words, it's changing the balance of the weight of concepts across the whole model.

Altering one concept is hardly "learning", especially since it's being done externally by researchers, but it's a start.

A much larger problem is that the energy consumption is several orders of magnitude larger than that of our brain. I'm not convinced that we have enough energy to make a standalone "AI".

What machine learning actually gave us is the ability to automatically improve a digital model of things, like weather prediction, something that took hours on a supercomputer to give you a week of forecast, now can be achieved on a laptop in minutes with a much longer range and accuracy. Machine learning made that possible.

An LLM is attempting the same thing with human language. It's tantalising, but ultimately I think the idea applied to language to create "AI" is doomed.

vk6flab , 21 days ago

Back propagation happens during the creation of the model, not after it's deployed.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

I've been using Linux for near enough a quarter of a century as my main desktop and I haven't regretted it yet.

Linux today is plenty easy to use today for a non-technical audience, runs with less resources, has global communities, comes in your language and it's free.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

For those wondering why. vim is the name of a popular text editor.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Manufacturer warranty?

vk6flab , 1 month ago

As opposed to the real apps that .. steal your data?

vk6flab , 1 month ago

It's ironic that Apple's single largest user base is the creative community and that as a company they haven't done anything creative since Steve Jobs died over a decade ago...

vk6flab , 1 month ago

It's right up there with random requirements to upload government photo id to suppliers in a different legal system. Hard Pass.

(I'm looking at you, PayPal, Airbnb and Stripe)

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Here in Australia, they were attempting to force us to provide Government Photo ID on Airbnb several years ago, we stopped using them instead.

There's a Know Your Customer (KYC) legislation that keeps being interpreted by numpties as requiring that they store these documents, rather than identify the user, create an account and dispose of the documents, which is making these companies rich hunting ground for infiltration by groups wanting to monetize personal data and provide identity theft services.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Note that there is no calibration of audio hardware, so the level of usefulness of any such software would be strictly limited.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

I don't know, but I doubt that the frequency response of a mobile phone microphone is either linear or consistent across sound level.

I don't even think you could compare two sounds with different frequencies, but I don't know.

I suspect that calibration of any such thing would require a whole lot of infrastructure, consider for example the angle of the phone in relation to sound and the impact of holding the phone in how it affects vibration and noise damping.

You might be able to use a calibrated sound level meter and pair it via Bluetooth with your phone, but I think that's going to be as close as you might get.

In the past I've tried a wired USB microphone, but the OS isn't real-time, so the jitter was horrendous. A pi would give you a more consistent result.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

You can change how long a phone rings for. Talk to her telco for both landline and mobile.

In my experience, if someone doesn't want to answer the phone, strapping it to their arm is unlikely to make any difference and in my experience they're more likely than not to leave it on the charger.

Long battery life and tiny battery are on opposite ends of physics. Pick your poison.

Health monitoring is unlikely to be transmitted to emergency services, except iOS fall detection.

iOS and Android are both tracking as much as they can get away with.

Remote management is likely only with devices used in corporate settings.

vk6flab , 1 month ago

Looks oversized to me, that's 3.25 cm x 3.25 cm, looks like they could take it down by 40% and still call it a 2x2 😇

vk6flab , 2 months ago

No. But it will run NetBSD 😇

vk6flab , 2 months ago

OMG!

That's sensational! Thank you so very much!

vk6flab , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Thank you, that's not something I knew, the three clients I've used show both the account and the name.

Edit: This is weird, my current client (Connect) shows the name, but only for my account, not for any other account.

vk6flab , 2 months ago

It turns out that some clients don't show my name together with my account. My name is Onno.