Lettuce eat lettuce

Ahh so it’s not just me! Glad a fix is on the way, I’ve been having a bunch of performance issues since the last update.

When you joined the CIA, you probably thought you’d be doing real spy stuff, huh?

Go sit on a Flock camera and make it disappear.

There are different reasons to run different things. Some apps are not able to be run as containers, or don’t make sense to run containerized.

VMs offer better isolation between systems, which is important for high-security applications.

Traditional Hypervisors also allow you to easily run fleets of completely different OSes on the same hardware, which you can’t do with containers.

On the other hand, if you want/need high scalability, extremely efficient resource usage, and you don’t need to run radically different OS environments simultaneously, containers, especially Docker containers or Podman containers are a great choice.

Incus containers are a great middle ground that I’m a fan of more than Docker/podman containers or traditional VMs. They are system containers, vs application containers like Docker/Podman.

That means they are actually full-fledged Linux distros by default, but are still much smaller than a traditional VM.

Also, for any of these solutions, if you’re constantly doing admin tasks manually, you’re doing it wrong. All modern platforms have APIs or other ways to interact with them via code.

For my own setup, I have everything. My main server runs XCP-ng for the hypervisor, and I have several traditional VMs on it, including my primary NAS. I also run a virtual Incus host that I have my Minecraft server running in, and some random other system containers. I have a Docker host VM, but I don’t really use it.

I also have my home media server which is a standalone system running TrueNAS on bare metal with Tailscale and Jellyfin running as Docker containers within TrueNAS.

My setup is messy because it has been built slowly over several years, and I don’t have enough time or energy to rip it all down and put it back together in a more optimal way.

Oh yeah, great, sounds awesome. Can I get in line now to not use it?

If you’ve already got Qubes and Xen Hypervisor running, your technical level is high enough for sure. And honestly, your security is already probably good enough.

Qubes has very secure defaults, I don’t think you need to do anything else, honestly what you have already might be overkill, but idk your use case.

Make sure you can’t see your torrent/download machine VM from any other devices on your network. Use Nmap as long as it’s your network. Don’t use it on a corporate or university network, it will likely get your device totally locked out and you in big trouble.

Let’s step back actually.

• What is your current PC running for an OS?
• What VM software are you using?
• What is your level of technical experience? (1 through 10)
• What are you the most worried about happening to your computer and home network?

Idk what software you’re using, but most VM software has an easy way to take a snapshot of the VM state. If you’re about to download something risky, take a quick VM snapshot, so if it ends up being some kind of malware, you can just roll the VM back to its earlier state without issue, takes like 2 minutes.

If you’re worried about malware spreading through your network, you need to isolate your devices. The most common way to do this is with VLANs, but I don’t know what your home network looks like, and if you just have a typical home setup with your ISP’s modem/router and all your devices plugged into it or on the default wireless network, you won’t be able to do that.

You could also use something like UFW on Linux to only allow internet traffic and block any traffic inbound or outbound to your LAN network, isolating your PC from all other devices on your LAN. This isn’t great, because if your host is compromised, then your host-based firewall could also be compromised and the malware could then get out to the rest of your network.

You could invert this and have all your other devices on LAN set to block all traffic from your specific PC, which would be more secure, but also a pain to configure, plus it assumes all the other devices are able to be configured in that way on your LAN.

There are a bunch of other solutions, but it depends on your setup, your technical skill level, and your threat profile. If you’re just torrenting cracked games and random software, that’s somewhat risky, but not really that crazy if you are running it in a VM with rollback snapshots.

My understanding is that this is just a sort of open forum/presentation on this as an idea. That being said, it’s a stupid-ass idea.

I don’t want my computer to “love me back” it’s a fucking machine that I built to do my work on and play my games on. I am the only form of agency I want having access to it.

If I ever want an AI agent running all the time in the background doing shit for me, I’ll fucking install and configure one myself! I want my OS to be an OS, not some “smart”, interactive fake person that will hallucinate random Bash commands, fuck my partitions up randomly, and bork my system.

I alone am the only thing that I want destroying my system, if that’s going to happen, it will happen by my own hands, my own shitty commands, my own piss-poor scripts.

This AI delusion and hype cycle is more infuriating than the NFT craze, and that’s really saying something.

1. Get an MMA kick pad or build one yourself, attach it to a horizontal bar.
2. Spend the next 3-4 months practicing kicking it precisely in the center as hard as you can. Do flutter kicks and squats as well to add strength.
3. Wear steel-toe boots/pointy high heels at all times when the Cats in the Hats are afoot.
4. When chased, face the attacker, assume kicking stance from your training, await the assailant until their crotch is within optimal striking distance.
5. Follow your training. Don’t kick the crotch, kick through it, as if you’re going to kick the inside of that cat’s top hat.
6. Yell, “Ughh! That top hat is tight! Now run that shit, bi*ch! Ynawmean!!”

I’m curious, are you this stupid professionally, or is it just a hobby?

1. No it doesn’t require a login to view, I literally just clicked and watched it.
2. I never said or implied that anybody “owes” me a content warning. It was merely a suggestion out of care & concern for other people who might be sensitive to this sort of content.

Brutal video, probably should have a warning for graphic content on this post. The soldier in the turret got destroyed by that blast, terrible.

I wouldn’t fight in any military anyways, but I especially could never be a tanker, I get claustrophobic pretty easily.

Whatever their rebrand is these days lol.

If that many evil people/corpos are involved, run as fast as you can the other direction.

Give me community-based distros like Debian, Arch, Mint, etc. I like my Linux democratic, anti-corpo, and inclusive.

Check out Linode, it’s easy to use, reasonably priced, and as far as I know, hasn’t done anything disgusting.

Only downside is that they were acquired a little while ago by a publicly traded company, so the likwlyhood of enshitification is higher.

Sure, how and what you ask does make a difference, especially on lower power models. But it’s generally not really significant, like learning how to write more effective prompts takes maybe a few hours of total time? Honestly, probably an hour at most for 95% of people using LLMs in a corporate environment.

The irony of all this, is that one of the supposed biggest advantages of LLMs is that you can just talk to them with natural language in a conversational format. The more people have to use special rules of conversation, format their prompts in specific ways, take advantage or avoid subtleties of the model’s preferred syntactic style, etc. The more LLMs become a technical tool that can only produce high quality results if you use it in very specific, skilled ways.

And one of the big risks with LLMs is staff who can recognise bullshit or questionable results being replaced with staff who unquestioningly accept whatever results they get. And people reading an “AI summary” of something and assuming it’s actually accurate.

That’s exactly the point from people who are making systemic critiques of the “AI” craze. LLMs by their very nature, encourage people to become lazy. I’m not worried about a machine that’s constantly wrong, depending on the application, I can control for that. I am worried about a machine that is almost always right. That’s really dangerous, because it lulls its users into a false sense of confidence and security.

There’s a saying I heard from an old sys-admin once, “It’s better to be broadly right, than precisely wrong.” Modern LLMs are a perfect example of the latter, they will get 95% of a task correct, but then mess up that last 5%. But it messes up that 5% in a way that is very subtle and convincing, and requires somebody with deep, technical knowledge to catch and mitigate. That fact, combined with how lazy people are incentivized to be when using them, is the deadly combo imo.

Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.

Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?

Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.

Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.

If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.

Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.

It’s really not for most people. You ask a question, the LLM answers. You ask it to do a task, it does it. Most people are not using these things for anything advanced or technically difficult.

I work in a big corporate office, if you exclude the IT staff and software devs, here’s a pretty exhaustive list of what everybody else is using LLMs for:

• Organizing emails.
• Drafting memos and auto-responses in Teams.
• Organizing cluttered files.
• Adding “artwork” to company fliers.
• Doing web searches.
• Summarizing emails and Teams messages and creating to-do lists from them.
• Searching large documents for key terms.

It’s grunt work, that’s what these things excel at, and that’s how most people use them. That’s fine, but acting like most people are somehow not able to unlock the “true potential” of these LLMs unless they have special training and skills is a marketing ploy to sell overpriced “AI” courses to gullible and ignorant executives and upper managers.

It’s like those stupid DEI courses that corporations have everybody take so they can “learn to not be problematic.” But all the quizzes are filled with stupid stuff like:

Your manager, Sarah finishes briefing you and your coworker, Phil on an upcoming project. After she leaves, Phil says to you, “That Sarah sure is a real juicy piece of meat, I’d love to get taste of her!” What should you do? A. High-five Phil and tell him you call dibs on her secretary. B. Tell Phil that his comment was not appropriate, then report it to HR.

It’s just there to check boxes for compliance and provide an excuse for other companies to charge outrageous prices to tell people that sexually assaulting your coworkers or pulling your eyelids tight and calling yourself “Ching Chong” isn’t appropriate office behavior.

It’s another way Capitalism poisons and hollows out substantive discussions about topics like systemic racism, multiculturalism, and gender relationships, in favor of standardized quizzes that cost thousands of dollars a year to administer.

The amount of “AI consultants” and “AI integration” firms that have popped up overnight is staggering. Just like with the crypto/blockchain craze a few years ago, everybody is trying to get rich quick off the hype.