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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Reality will show us dying in a completely alien biosphere as bacteria and viruses we have zero resistance against ravages our bodies the moment we’re exposed to it

    It’s really unlikely that alien bacteria and viruses (if alien life even uses the same building blocks ours does, such that microscopic life forms could even be called “bacteria” and “viruses”) would find our bodies terribly hospitable or be well adapted (at first) to live inside us. It’s much more likely that

    • Even if an alien biosphere produces some mix of oxygen / nitrogen / carbon dioxide, that the atmospheric balance will be WAY off and we won’t be able to breath it (Avatar may have gotten a bunch of science stuff wrong, but it got THIS right, unlike every other sci fi movie ever). Changing it so that we COULD breath it would probably be a major extinction level event for most life in the native biosphere.

    • We won’t be able to eat the local life (and it won’t be able to eat us). Our crops won’t grow in the soil (until we change it and introduce earth microbes and fungi). Once Earth life and alien life have co-existed for millions of years (long after we’re gone or evolved into something else) this may CHANGE (life forms from both biospheres may co-evolve and figure out how to parasitize and eventually consume each other).

    I’m not saying we won’t die (if we ever try) for a whole host of reasons (and fuck up someone else’s environment in the process), just it won’t be (biological) alien diseases colonizing our bodies.








    • Theoretically Yes, if your Linux partition is not encrypted, any OS can read it. Password protecting it doesn’t do anything to conceal your data, just keeps people from logging into your system while Linux is booted. If this is a security / privacy related question, there is nothing to stop a program running under Windows from reading the data on your Linux partition except

    • Practically No, depending on the filesystem you chose (if you went with the default, it’s likely ext4 but could be something more exotic). Out of the box Windows lacks the software / drivers to read most Linux filesystems. If this is a “can I access my files” question, you probably need to install something like this to read your data from Windows. Note that the reverse is not true. Most distros other than light weight distros like Alpine are perfectly able to read the NTFS file system out of the box. Sometimes they can’t write to it unless you install additional tools (like OOTB Debian probably can’t, but I’m pretty sure OOTB Linux Mint can if you change a setting and IDK about OOTB Ubuntu / Fedora / Arch).

    The easiest way to share data between Windows and Linux is with a 3rd partition formatted to FAT32, as both Linux and Windows have no problem reading from / writing to it without additional software.

    EDIT: The other poster is absolutely correct. The modern way to do this is with exFAT. What can I say? I’m a crusty old engineer.

    It’s very likely that adware / spyware / malware targeting Windows users will NOT be able to read Ext4 or other Linux filesystems, unless it’s specifically targeted to do so, so you do have that added “security through obscurity” protection.







  • If those words are connected to some automated system that can accept them as commands…

    For instance, some idiot entrepreneur was talking to me recently about whether it was feasible to put an LLM on an unmanned spacecraft in cis-lunar space (I consult with the space industry) in order to give it operational control of on-board systems based on real time telemetry. I told him about hallucination and asked him what he thinks he’s going to do when the model registers some false positive in response to a system fault… Or even what happens to a model when you bombard it’s long-term storage with the kind of cosmic particles that cause random bit flips (This is a real problem for software in space) and how that might change its output?

    Now, I don’t think anyone’s actually going to build something like that anytime soon (then again the space industry is full of stupid money), but what about putting models in charge of semi-autonomous systems here on earth? Or giving them access to APIs that let them spend money or trade stocks or hire people on mechanical Turk? Probably a bunch of stupid expensive bad decisions…

    Speaking of stupid expensive bad decisions, has anyone embedded an LLM in the ethereum blockchain and givien it access to smart contracts yet? I bet investors would throw stupid money at that…




  • We’re also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

    A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who’s worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it’s “more powerful” but I like Forgejo because it’s just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn’t give me to many more options.

    We have

    • Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client’s projects have access to their repos).
    • Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we’ve had a couple clients that want that).
    • Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

    One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It’s hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren’t mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it’s now a non issue for us though because we were like “Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that’s why we have two infrastructure people!”



  • Too complex to explain to anyone who’s not a politically / culturally curious intellectual (or who even just lacks a lot of the sci-fi / gaming and science nerd inspired philosophical context).

    A lot of these breakdowns of the weird and out of touch thought coming out of upper class technocrats and their acolytes are missing this kind of bridge: a simple way to explain this to anyone who wouldn’t read more than the first paragraph of this article. No one like that is going to try to parse an acronym like TESCREAL.

    My main thought about this is that “Right” and “Left” aren’t even the right terms and using them gives people the wrong impression of what’s happening. It’s better to say that techno-authoritarians with their heads in the sci-fi clouds are attracting followers from the intellectual and better educated side of the “disaffected young men” pool and are aligning themselves with more traditionally conservative authoritarians for the sake of political convenience. They don’t want the government or left wing populism getting in the way of their profits and science experiments, so their support lines up with the party that wants to sabotage the government.