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arminiusreturns

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This is super cool!

I am using some llm work to help me bring my mmo project (2013-present) to prod, but my project is much more about pushing the edge of the mmo technology space, and my strategy has as one of its pillars the importance of owning the IP, which means adhering to the current laws in my production pipeline, so I only use unix/linux philosophy and have the llm do small tiny things in skeleton mode so I can rewrite them enough to claim they are actually mine, which they are. Even though I intend to open source the client fully, and the assets, I have to have the copyright so I can assign it to those licenses.

Technically, according to current SCOTUS rulings and precedent set so far (hopefully better things and changes to come, but here we are), this can not be copyrighted by the person who paid for the compute to make it.

When money starts hitting these kinds of projects, the legal wolves will be soon at the door, and it's going to get messy I think. So I still support open source gaming projects, but pure agentic or vibed games are probably going to face tons of challenges in the not too distant future based on my analysis.

Now if we could just get people to combine Guix and other guile scheme packages that are awesome like mcron into their stacks, and then backfeed more fixes into the ecosystem, we have a real chance at helping GNUland!

If you are a complete normie, turn back now, it's gonna get conspiratorial. Otherwise, read on for some insights.

First, one must understand that the Federal Reserve was the main trojan horse vehicle for the European banking families into America. Read any number of good books, starting with the latest edition of G. Edward Griffins "The Creature from Jekyll Island".

But all that is mostly known already to those who have payed attention and done the reading... so whats next?

My conclusion is that America is being setup, in multiple ways (fall guy for global empire, etc), but one major setup that is going on right now is a twofer: 1) Jack up the US economy at any time by raising rates and unraveling the ponzi scheme and 2) If you do 1), you have the perfect excuse to try to implement some CBDC-esque new system, but this time with much more surveillance tech, for example unified ledgers that merge digital identity with financial identity, with ESG and social credit style added on. Read Whitney Webb for more on the structures being put in place for this.

So what is happening is that Trump knows the people that control the Fed, for whom the Fed chair is a mere mouthpiece, really want to suddenly and unexpectedly hike rates and soon, but Trump doesn't want it to happen under his last term, so he has been doing major backroom maneuvering to influence the Fed every time a rate-change date is coming up. Essentially he wants to kick the can to the next POTUS, but since the Fed is technically independent, it really can do whatever it wants, all he can do is fire after the fact. My guess is they will drop it on him late term, a perfect excuse to usher in the political pendulum swing of the hegelian game they play with us.

To me, that this backroom maneuvering is becoming more public tells me they really want to do the sudden rate hike.

Want a decent intro to the real fed? Try this video from the great James Corbett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJeemTQ7Vk

I'm doing a metasim in full 3D with physics, I just keep seeing the limitations of the video format too much, but it is amazing when done right. The other biggest concern is licensing of output.

Social gates, not tech ones. Linkedin exploits the network effects of gui-ninjas under stockholm syndrome to an anti-user service.

The same reason you get wierd looks when you say you don't facebook sometimes.

It's like existing outside the control or influence of some $manyuser $app/$website is unthinkable to those who exist within the prison ecosystems. I am a greybeard linux admin moonlighting in windows world, and the state of infra in ms land is baaaaadddd. When I tell engineers though, I get a thousand justifications about why its ok that its this bad (because it was worse before, etc), because the tooling is so bad it gets in the way of accomplishing your goals.

Same mentality... I personally don't really understand it. Either you control your compute or you don't.

Thats who linkedin draws. I used to exclude linkedin resumes when interviewing heavier linux engineering/ops candidates for this reason.

UFW and Firewall-CMD both just use iptables in that context though. The real upgrade is in switching to nftables. I know I'm going to need to learn eBpf as the next step too, but for now nftables is readable and easy to grok especially after you rip out the iptables stuff, but technically nftables is still using netfilter.

And ufw supports nftables btw. I think the real lesson is write your own firewalls and make them non-permissive - then just template that shit with CaC.

Just as cloud agnosticism means you should be able to bootstrap your infra in different clouds, that also includes your ci/cd. As a greybeard sysadmin, my advice is to start separating your ci/cd from the platforms you run on.

https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a...

Another of my tricks is to tie in your containerization there too, system-nspawn is what I'm using at the moment, but it can apply to others.

Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0

The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.

UK House of Lords are a buncha of Jimmy Savile pal types, if you get my drift. The same blackmail and bribery networks that exist in the US largely were learned from the Brits, who of course gave Palestine to the zionists on behalf of dragging America into a war they mostly engineered via Edward the 7ths diplomatic intrigues and the pre-war formation of the entangling alliances.

So for a long time, I traced most roads in the US back to London... (for example Star Chamber origins)...

After a while though, as I dug into the real history of banking, I realized when William of Orange was installed it was shortly after that the Bank of England was established to take them over the same way they later influenced us (Jekyll Island) to establish the Fed, the main trojan horse for a country being monetary countrol.

So I now understand just like the masons, or intel dudes, etc, many of them are just so compartmentalized they don't know what they are a part of. I now view the UK the same way.

So lets keep following the strings up the chain...

"You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect." - Miyamoto Musashi

Modern Linux tools 9 months ago

I think many of us linux admins have such a list. Mine in particular is carefully crafted around GPL-izing my stack as much as possible. I really like the format of this ikrima.dev one though! The other stuff is great too, worth a peruse.

Modern Linux tools 9 months ago

Another reason emacs as an OS (not fully, but you know) is such a great way to get used to things you have on systems. Hence the quote: "GNU is my operating system, linux is just the current kernel".

As a greybeard linux admin, I agree with you though. This is why when someone tells me they are learning linux the first thing I tell them is to just type "info" into the terminal and read the whole thing, and that will put them ahead of 90% of admins. What I don't say is why: Because knowing what tooling is available as a built-in you can modularly script around that already has good docs is basically the linux philosophy in practice.

Of course, we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default, but since these days we do idempotent ci/cd configs, adding a tui-editor of choice should be trivial.

Even in the US, selling to kids is illegal in most states, so the same issue applies: kid can't buy vape at store, kid goes to adult who is likely to be criminal to get them to buy for them, now kid is vulnerable to exploitation.

I recently did a deep dive on cli password management in an attempt to harden my bash scripts. (yes, I love bash, despite HN always loving to talk crap about it)

Pass is just a shell wrapper around gnupg, when you run pass some/secret/path, what actually happens is pass constructs and executes a gpg command (e.g., gpg --decrypt ~/.password-store/some/secret/path.gpg) and the output of gpg (the plaintext secret) is piped to pass's stdout.

Most people know this though. What I learned I didn't know before though was this:

Memory Zeroing: after it's used (e.g., copied to a pipe or stdout), GPG's internal memory management aims to zero out those memory regions used as soon as they are no longer needed

Memory Locking: GnuPG also uses mlock() (or equivalent OS-specific calls) to lock sensitive memory pages into RAM. This prevents the plaintext keys and decrypted data from being swapped out to disk, protecting against swap-file forensics or cold boot attacks.

I had been banging my head against bash trying to do those things manually, and ended up with the conclusion it was best to use pass/gpg with the following addendums (from my notes in my skeleton secure bash template):

1. Minimize secret lifetime: Use subshells, functions with local variables, and unset, disable bash history

2. Pipe secrets directly: Pass secrets via stdin or process substitution directly to the consuming program without intermediate variables if possible.

3. Rely on the tools: Use pass, gpg, or KMS CLIs that are themselves implemented in lower-level languages and can (and should) implement these memory protection techniques internally.

ps: keepassxc is the other favorite to use

Security, including privacy, is about layers of hardening. In this case, minimization of leakage and other privacy concerns for some can still be worth the tradeoffs. For example, some apps literally refuse to work on a completely de-googled phone. (I ran one for many years with no google services). Also, the general control the user gets offers a lot more ability to harden than most android. I bricked my phone and am currently borrowing one and using stock android and there are things like facebook that are literally uninstallable... At least on lineage/graphene the user can actually control the system.

No, because it became a locked down ecosystem that is user-hostile and not user-controllable. I realized this when I observed the younger generation, who I thought would be much better than us at computing, who had not a clue how anything worked because they never had the ability, need, or desire to tinker with the underlying systems, with only rare exceptions (roms, etc).

I grew up in the mountains at about 8500 ft, but was often spending my freetime at higher elevations surrounding the village. There are lots of little things about living at high altitude people don't think about, such as cooking times and quirks, sealed containers exploding when going up, etc. My favorite has to be just how superhuman (when I was in my prime) going down to low elevation made me feel.

The biggest issue people don't talk about? Remote high alt places often become unlivable for people when they get elderly due to altitude interference in certain medical conditions, and the general distance away from hospitals.

I miss the mountains so much all the time, and hope to retire back up there.