hendrik

I watched too much Star Trek when I was young. I think 195 have to go. All humans should unite and reach for the stars, instead of some stupid in-fighting, killing each other, and burning down of wealth because of bigotry.

(Edit: I live in a big melting pot. I have enough people from Syria, Iran… and “white” people around me. And I can tell you, we all have the same goals in life, we enjoy similar things, are family fathers who all want to see their kids prosper, fight the same struggles in our lives… There’s zero reason to focus on destruction and small-mindedness. We should do better. And invest the same energy into useful things. That goes for the average people. Not the ruling class. Those -of course- are motivated to disunite and stay in business.)

I strongly doubt this war is about who’s on the board of some state owned financial institute. I mean even if that conspiracy were true, where’s the bombing of like 120 other countries out of the roughly 195 we have on the planet?

Hmmh. I’ve heard the argument before, that they’re better off almost having nuclear weapons. But it that really the case? I mean North Korea is kind of an outliar. Lots of other countries have nuclear weapons as well, France, China… and none of them is a pariah. So I’m not sure if that’s even true. Usually more weapons is more better. Or so they say.

Edit: But we’re arguing logic here. And oftentimes politics isn’t as straightforward. I mean I don’t think we know the truth anyway. It’s completely unclear to me as an average citizen if they were close to nukes, if that’s even the biggest issue and reason for this. For all I know everyone could be lying or framing things, including following more than one motive.

Is the .gl domain down as well? Or is my DNS messing with me? I can open the newer ones, though.

Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.

For remote management, I just enable SSH, configure it to run on some non-standard port and enable Fail2ban… Make sure I use certificates or secure passwords and also check if fail2ban is actually doing its job. Never had any issues with that setup.

For the services I’ll either use a reverse proxy, plus configure the applications not to allow infinite login attempts, or Wireguard / a VPN.

Normal DVD-R max out at 4.7GB. Wikipedia says there are double layer recordable DVDs with 8.5 GB, I’ve just never seen one of them. But they’re available on Amazon.

Idk. I usually just copy files onto USB thumbdrives these days.

Well, I’ve listened to audiobooks on Spotify (and Tidal) for a while, but that’s not piracy. You could try “hoerbuch” followed by the top-level domain of the United States. And the local library here has several shelves filled with audiobooks. I might have ripped a few to listen to them on modern devices…

I follow a similar strategy. I back up my important stuff. And I’m gonna have to re-rip my DVD collection and redownload the Linux ISOs in the unlikely case the RAID falls apart. That massively cuts down on the amount of storage needed.

Weird article. Is this some domain specific breakthrough? Because I’m fairly sure laboratories and researchers use some ultra precise experimental setups and sampling machines for like half a century now? For example an elaborate machine that loads 200 blood samples at a time and it’ll return the lab results to the hospital within a few hours. For what used to be a time consuming, labor intensive job with a higher error rate before… But we have these machines for quite some time now… They didn’t include any AI in the advertising, though. Same with material sciences, I believe. Either they’re doing something very specific and it’s a lot of manual labor. Or they have to test a lot of samples, or handle things very precisely, and someone is going to build a jig with robots or actuators. But that’s kind of what people always did? I mean they did palletizing robots in the 60s, and the KUKA robot arm was patented in 1973. And this article reads a bit (to me) like the job description of such a KUKA robotic arm… But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?

Maybe correct? Though my cable modem gobbles down some 15W… Without even doing the Wifi… So, I bet this isn’t a universal truth, as a Mini-PC will comsume less and provide all kinds of extra services, networking, NAS…

Livekit can be used to build voice assistants. But it’s more a framework to build an agent yourself, not a ready-made solution.

And there’s another custom component, integrating all servers with an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint: https://github.com/jekalmin/extended_openai_conversation

This is a lot of framing to make it look better for OpenAI. Blaming everyone and rushed technology instead of them. They did have these guardrails. Seems they even did their job and flagged him hundreds of times. But why don’t they enforce their TOS? They chose not to do it. Once I breach my contracts and don’t pay, or upload music to youtube, THEY terminate my contract with them. It’s their rules, and their obligation to enforce them.

I mean why did they even invest in developing those guardrails and mechanisms to detect abuse, if they then choose to ignore them? This makes almost no sense. Either save that money and have no guardrails, or make use of them?!