@awlnx that is more dangerous, you can actually reason about a new mac. I don't really have any excuse.

@awlnx oh boy I think I need a new mbp as well... m3 max doesn't seem to do 6K120 🤦

@awlnx I'm congratulating myself on getting 64gb in my desktop years ago. But I'm stuck with an older CPU now because of it.

@awlnx also makes me wonder if I need a new GPU to drive it lol.

@awlnx damn it, now I want one as well :D

That is some feature set... also eye watering price.

Plenty of people is blaming "AI" in the abstract for the recent RAM price spikes, but I haven't seen anybody around here point to the actual and direct culprit of it all: Sam Altman secretly bought 40% of silicon wafers (not even produced RAM, just the silicon wafers) from two of the biggest RAM manufacturers, at the same time. Not even with specific plans for what kind of RAM do with them. This is just to mess up with competitors.

Seriously, you can't hate OpenAI enough.

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html
🧵
https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/

Looks like #vscode has peaked... all I see nowadays in the release notes is AI related functionality. Not surprising given microsoft's favourite money pit, but they are forgetting this editor grew so rapidly because they actually focused for years on making it the best* general purpose code editor.

* at least in the graphical world, terminal crowd keep calm :)

I'm going to tell you a little story about why I inherently mistrust technology companies who "move fast and break things", and in particular how this applies in generative AI.

I was working as a senior technical writer for a multinational company up until the end of last year, when the US parent company decided that a product team isn't a necessary function and all you need is engineers™️. Given that I was the writer in charge of all developer documentation, as well as the developer of the writing platform we worked on, I was told to assess the use of a generative AI tool to improve search.

I shan't name the company with whom we worked because I don't want to give them any publicity (even bad publicity), but suffice to say they were a generative AI chatbot outfit who claimed specialty in summarizing knowledgebases. Sounds like an ideal fit, thinks I, and I have seen this tool used elsewhere to mixed results. So I set up a consultation with them to get some information.

I meet with the CEO over Zoom and ask some pointed questions about the product. Mostly, the answers were pretty standard. However, two of them worried me immensely.

The first question was around pricing. I informed them of our content structure, the number of users we had on a daily basis, and the number of search queries we handled + associated clickthrough rates. I asked how much – ballpark – their product would set us back. That, he replied, was an unknown. They would negotiate a price with us, and anything that we used over that price would be absorbed by them. A screaming red flag, if ever I saw one.

The next was one that was extremely important to me. The company I worked for had a huge footprint in Asia, particularly in Japan. We hired localizers and translators to work on all copy so that we could be sure that it was translated appropriately for each country, and also to help us with naming conventions. Let's say you have a company called SoHo Housing, and you specialize in building management. Then let's say you hit upon the idea of creating a queryable index of housing stock that you want to sell as an addon. You call this product "SHIndex". Your Japanese localizer will immediately point out that Japanese clients will hate this name due to the inclusion of "Shi" ("死") meaning "death". At this point, you need to rework the name.

I asked this CEO about how the bot would handle international content. We stored content for different languages under subpaths (e.g. /en, /ja, /ko, /zh) and worked hard with localizers to make the content searchable. The CEO responded excitedly that this didn't matter, and that only the English language content was needed. The mechanism, he explained, was that the bot would detect a person was asking a question in Japanese, translate it to English, query the content set to find an answer, then translate a summary of that content to Japanese.

At this point, the answer was an immediate "no". It may well be that this company has now resolved this issue, but they should under no circumstances have been allowed anywhere near a production knowledgebase with such a provably terrible design that would cause glaring and sensitive issues. That's quite beside the fact that the generated summaries were often misleading or flat out wrong, or that caching would have forced us to expensively reindex content if we needed to correct something. The absolute lack of understanding of their chosen field was utterly baffling and extremely concerning.

I really despise the fact that the software industry is full of people who really just don't seem to care about the basics. If this limitation was presented as such, that might have been acceptable. If they'd have said "this only works with English content" we might have trialed it. But the fact that they had monkey-patched such a dangerous solution and presented it as production-ready meant that I had to veto the use of the product entirely.

Good fun. Fuck software.

"To ensure sovereignty, OpenAI for Germany will be supported by SAP’s subsidiary Delos Cloud, running on Microsoft Azure technology." - that is not how any of this works, Germany! https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-for-germany/

"Are you pondering what I’m pondering?"
"I think so, Brain, but why would a federated social network care about our anniversary?”

"Pinky and the Brain" debuted on 9 september 1995.

When #PortKnocking was first introduced, somebody made a fork of #PuTTY which had it built in. We didn't take the patch upstream, because it seemed so likely that port knocks would keep evolving and we'd have to run to keep up; we thought a better design would be to delegate to a "make my connection, with any necessary knocks" sub-tool.

But the best thing about this fork was its name. The author called it PoTTY. And it came with a full suite of supporting tools with names like Pogeant and Plonk. Top marks!

More great news thanks to the switch to @HAProxy 3.2

We now support QUIC! 🚀

IPv4: 185.150.99.255 / 5.1.66.255
IPv6: 2001:678:e68:f000:: / 2001:678:ed0:f000::
DoH: https://doh.ffmuc.net/dns-query
DoT: dot.ffmuc.net

We are switching our loadbalancers to @HAProxy 3.2 at the moment. This should also improve the performance of our DoH servers :). 🚀

IPv4: 185.150.99.255 / 5.1.66.255
IPv6: 2001:678:e68:f000:: / 2001:678:ed0:f000::
DoH: https://doh.ffmuc.net/dns-query
DoT: dot.ffmuc.net

But why not serve Dresden, Bautzen & Görlitz directly, as they're much more significant than Ruhland & Hoyerswerda that will be served?

Because of THIS

This is the border bridge between Görlitz 🇩🇪 to the left, and Zgorzelec 🇵🇱 to the right - you can see the electrification masts end in the middle

The star trek future we have at home:

#GamersNexus investigative movie on the #Nvidia black market trade with #China got taken down after just 2-3 days via #DMCA (who'd have thought that it's going to be abused to silence journalism!).

For those who're still interested, it's on archive.org for now. Download and backup it.
https://archive.org/details/the-nvidia-ai-gpu-black-market-investigating-smuggling-corruption-governments

Should that go offline I may or may not have a copy.
#Journalism #USA #censorship

https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-is-getting-a-better-yaml/ - "what if I could make yaml more like json" said nobody sane, ever