Because this is the talk of the #internet again: you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so *don't try to guess*.

That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies.

Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it.

96 files changed, 3224 insertions, 2326 deletions, 8 dead, 19 injured, 4 missing

I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

One thing I’ve noticed about people who sell LLMs, it’s not just the models that hallucinate

You don't need to be a futurism savant to notice the connection and extrapolate a certain kind of future from these 2 sentences:

'Thursday afternoon in #SanFrancisco: On one side of Mission Street, hotel workers chanted and banged on a drum outside the Marriott Marquis, part of a monthslong strike for higher wages and more #jobs. On the other, a tech company’s billboard proclaimed, “Stop #hiring humans.”'

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sf-artisan-billboards-stop-hiring-humans-19969672.php

#AI

Alt...

Billboard in San Franciso proclaiming "Stop Hiring Humans, the era of AI employees is here"

Can you imagine anything more dystopian than this?

Billboards in San Francisco saying “stop hiring humans”

#ai #dystopian #capitalism #sanfrancisco

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/ai-company-trolls-san-francisco-with-billboards-saying-stop-hiring-humans/

Alt...

Artisan billboard saying that AI workers do not need work-life balance, meanwhile a homeless person is sitting beside.

"Are you going to take off those headphones so we can discuss this like mature adults, Harry? Or, are you just going to sit there like a petulant child?”

Alt...

An old man wearing headphones sits on a park bench with a pelican.

This is my favorite part of the OpenBSD installer because I get it wrong every time, but I love that they anticipated it! #openbsd

Alt...

Text from the OpenBSD installer asking "Setup a user? (enter a lower-case loginname, or 'no')". The user enters "yes" and the next prompt says "No really, what is the lower-case loginname, or 'no'?"

Y, entre esas webs tan especializadas está, estaba, Linkedin y para la que he descubierto un pequeño truco para conseguir que, al menos puedas enviar la petición de cierre.

Todas los documentos que he visto señalan que hay que ir a los ajustes y en la sección de seguridad elegir la opción de "Cerrar cuenta". Hasta ahí bien, ¿no? Entonces te preguntan por el motivo, le dices cual, luego te muestran a personas de las que vas a perderte publicaciones y te entra la risa floja. (¿Perderme publicaciones? Pero si nadie envía nada que merezca la pena. Ojo, al menos de los que tengo bajo mis "contactos").

Bueno, pues una vez superada la cuestión tienes un pequeño formulario donde debes escribir la contraseña y marca -si lo quieres- una casilla para no recibir comunicaciones de la empresa. Después se activa un botón que reza "Hecho" y ...

Y nada, porque el botón no hay manera de que se active. No la hay porque como he puesto una contraseña compleja y enorme -y uso un gestor de contraseñas- no se me ocurrió escribirla a mano si no pegarla.

No, pegarla no funciona. Y escribir la contraseña supersegura y compleja es una locura. Así que el paso previo es cambiar la contraseña por algo como "adiosatodos" y reiniciar el proceso entrando a manita la frase.

Y ahí sí. Ahí sí que funciona. Ahora voy con el resto de las webs: infojobs, trabajos.com, y varias más que no producen más que ruido. Ya veremos si es sencillo o también tengo que aprender cosas que no quiero.

This is the kind of HR diversity training we need.

Alt...

A screenshot from a social media site. It reads: so my brother was telling me about this human resources certification he attended a while ago. in a panel, the panelist asked a bunch of people in attendance, “who here knows if an applicant for a job s right for it in under 60 seconds?" hands shot up around the room, people smug about their ability to “weed out the riff-raff* when it came to hiring for their fortune 500. “you should all be fired and probably in jail." they said, waiting for the whole room to get uncomfortable, then continued, “because the only things you can really learn about a human being in under 60 seconds are all things that are fueled by prejudices and biases covered by american law. so now, i will teach you how to stop being racist, sexist, judgmental assholes and hire people that will better your company of employ

So law enforcement wants us to believe 'The Adjuster' went from being professionally-trained and calculating (even leaving a haunting message inscribed on shell casings) to someone who would be caught in a McDonald's with incriminating evidence on his person.

I'm not buying it.

Not one bit.

#unitedhealthcare

@kiwix Send them a request for information under #GDPR rules, specifically article 15, forcing them to send you *all* data they have. Hetzner is based in Germany, so they have to comply. Template at: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-access-request/

Ok, here’s my first IT Horror Story of the Saturday night. It's a bit long.

I was at a client, a healthcare facility, to replace some hard drives. They didn’t want to spend money, so we had to keep the current setup running, which was outdated and unreliable.
Now I can say it: they didn’t want to spend because the general manager’s goal was to give work to a company of his friends, who were already providing support on two VMs, and he wanted to hand everything over to them. The IT manager hadn’t yet understood the financial interests of these people and still believed everything was in good faith, that they really didn’t have the funds. We were holding everything together with duct tape, but it was working and stable. I had set up a "cluster" with OpenNebula and GlusterFS for storage (later replaced with MooseFS and then with Ceph), using all available hardware.

We scheduled an intervention and notified everyone to disconnect and shut down the machines by 12:30. By 13, we had completed the backups, aiming to start the intervention by 14 and get the work up and running by 15:30. The goal was to update the systems and check the disks. We shut down all the VMs, had everyone disconnect. It was lunchtime.
We updated the servers, rebooted them. One of the disks started throwing errors. GlusterFS, for some reason I never really investigated (I have my theories, which I’ll share later, but from that day forward, GlusterFS no longer exists for me), decided to overwrite both that disk and its replica with zeros. I hadn’t changed anything.

Panic – there were backups, but on a USB 2 disk (old servers, no USB 3)! I immediately stopped everything. I was almost fainting. The IT manager didn’t understand what had happened, so I explained it to him. He announced to everyone that we would cancel the rest of the intervention, restore from backup, and have the work back up by 15:30 as planned, prioritizing the most critical VMs.

The "competing" company reached out. They had powered on one of their VMs and started "doing their own interventions." Even though they had been warned not to do anything. And they complained "we" had lost some of their data. Of course, the manager and those guys went "carpe diem": they put me under accusation, saying I had undoubtedly made a mistake that led to "lost data." I wrote a technical report explaining what I had seen, noting various SSH logins from those guys during the intervention. The "history" had been erased. Of course, not by me.

They continued to harass me for a while. The last thing they asked was for me to go to a meeting "to explain in person." They tried to schedule it the day before my wedding. And they knew it.

They threatened to ask me for an unspecified (high) financial compensation for 'the lost data.' What lost data? The ones that, allegedly, the other company would have entered in the meantime.

Final result: no problem for me (I hadn’t done anything wrong), the backups were fine, they only calmed down when I proved (logs in hand) that I wasn’t the only one connected to that machine, and my witnesses (two colleagues and the IT manager) had seen all my actions, confirming I hadn’t done anything wrong.

In the end: I realized they would do it again and I left the client – even the IT manager decided to resign and change jobs. The general manager managed to install, at astronomical figures, the company he wanted to place. After two months, they got their hands on the system and broke it. They asked me for assistance, which I refused. At any price.

After a few years, I found out that the general manager ended up in jail for corruption, bribes, and for favoring his friend companies in many sectors.

That day, I celebrated.

#HorrorStory #ITHorrorStory #ITSupport #TechTroubles #SysAdmin

Okay so the main thing I'm learning from all the US healthcare horror stories being dropped the past few days is that the United States is a ghost story told to smaller nations of what will happen to them if they're bad.

If a site badgers you to turn off your ad blocker, remember that advertisers, not you, are the site’s real audience.

You are what the site sells.

Ad/tracker blocking is self-care.

Is there any escape from the tyranny of modern work tools?

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/modern-work-fucking-sucks/

In recent days, I've received a few messages and noticed some posts regarding my articles on the blog. The criticism is mainly about the fact that, in some cases, I don't document "every" step but assume a basic understanding of the topics discussed. For example, if the article is about "how to install Y within a FreeBSD jail," I don't document how to install FreeBSD, what jails are, or how they should be managed, etc. In some cases, I refer to previous articles, but my aim is never to create "for dummies" tutorials. I believe that self-hosting, if done without awareness, creates more problems than it solves.

I’ll probably need to publish an article specifically about this—and maybe link it to a menu at the top of the page to explain it. My approach has usually been to provide tools to understand how I solved a problem, not to hand out "ready-made solutions"—the goal is to help people understand, not to mindlessly copy without comprehension.

After all, the blog is called "IT Notes," and they are my notes, turned into articles, mostly related to direct experiences I’ve just had. It’s not called "IT Course"—those, when necessary, I create in other ways.

#ITNotes #BlogPosts #Blog

For those who might have missed this excellent piece by Timothy Snyder over the weekend. Excellent piece. Excellent context. More than worth your time.
#politics #history

https://snyder.substack.com/p/trumpomuskovia

Si es que estos dos son unos jefazos... https://buff.ly/4eV4eTa

https://elpais.com/icon/2024-11-30/como-el-algoritmo-ha-arruinado-tu-bar-favorito-estamos-condenados-a-que-todo-se-parezca-a-todo.html

#paywall

CC: @oxyhyxo@bsd.cafe

Secret Panel HERE 😑 https://tapas.io/episode/2927671

CC: @Remittancegirl@mstdn.social @fencepost@infosec.exchange

I'm truly a fool. 😆

CC: @Roquette@paquita.masto.host

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

I’m not pirating movies, I’m just training my model.

Mi experiencia es diferente. Yo no me corto en sonreír, ser afable y hasta simpático, respetando las distancias y sin intentar ser gracioso. Muy pocas veces he tenido otra respuesta que simpatía de vuelta y buen rollo, y cuando no ha sido así, entiendo que no es el momento ni la situación y paso a un modo correcto y distante.

Yo soy un tipo bastante sociable y me resulta fácil entender las señales que mi interlocutor/a me manda. Entiendo que no todo el mundo tiene esa facilidad (pero, conociéndote como te conozco, creo que tú también la tienes).

For years, I misread the title as Lonely as an Eyesore.

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

It's probably one of the oldest sounds on Earth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1hWp4pQpAs

#Religion #Catholicism #Poverty #Quotes #ChristopherHitchens

Alt...

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. — Christopher Hitchens

Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.

It looks pretty cool.

it’s reassuring to know that the most vocal leftist influencers are laser-focused on the greatest challenge of our time: the size of their audience on bluesky

Se aprueba finalmente la conocida como "Ley Mbappé", con su trampa incluida como expliqué hace un tiempo en El Salto...
https://buff.ly/4hVrK4W

https://www.eldiario.es/economia/40-minutos-decidir-si-casa-vida-competimos-inversor-pagar-contado_1_11813746.html

Joder, en esto no había caído yo. Ahora resulta que comprar casa es también una especie de juegos del hambre trampeados. Estaría bien saber cuántas personas trabajan ahora mismo para dar con soluciones al problema de la vivienda. No importa de qué partido, es por saber si hay alguien pensando en ello y no haciendo el paripé.

Bueno, la solución de la derecha es siempre construir más vivienda y eso está superbien porque tenemos mogollón de pruebas de lo bien que ha funcionado en este país tiempo atrás.

Es que todo empieza con las definiciones. Te dicen que cincuenta kilómetros es aceptable como distancia al lugar de trabajo y a partir de ahí date por jodido. 😞

https://song.link/es/i/392428921

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4442029

This afternoon, an acquaintance joined a Mastodon instance and asked me which "celebrities" are present in the Fediverse, as if it were important to determine the value of a social network based on that.

I told him that the most important user in the Fediverse is him. Just as it’s you, reading this. Someone who has decided to interact with others freely. Who has chosen to trust their administrator (or create their own instance) more than they trust those who run traditional, monolithic, centralized social networks.

So, I want to thank all the friends of BSD Cafe, whether local or not, for being here and making this place what it is. And I thank all my friends in the Fediverse, who make my timeline lively, interesting, intelligent, fun, and thought-provoking - every day, at any time.

#BSDCafe #Mastodon #Fediverse #SocialNetworks #SocialMedia #Community #Trust #OpenSource #DigitalFreedom #JoinTheFediverse

He visto muchísimos programas que no utiliza, especialmente VPN y "aceleradores del sistema", que muestran ventanitas informativas de muchas formas y a las que hay que contestar, patrón oscuro mediante, que no te interesa, gracias, me cago en tus muelas, etc., para que se cierren.

Lo peor es que al desinstalarlos han redoblado esfuerzos y han vuelto a sacar otras muchas ventanas más y, como no parecía suficiente, abriendo también varias páginas web. En todas ellas me recuerdan que desinstalarlo es una mala elección y que me ofrecen un descuento si compro una licencia del programa que estoy desinstalando. ¿Tan difícil es de pillar o es que son unos cabrones desalmados?

Google Chrome, por cierto, estaba desaparecido en el sistema sin saber cómo y es su navegador favorito. He tenido que desinstalarlo (fallo), acceder a la página de descargas de Google vía Microsoft Edge primero (imposible con todas las pantallas que me ha abierto para preguntarme cosas) y luego con Firefox.

Descargar, instalar y ... ¡reiniciar el sistema! Tampoco sé por qué pero los enlaces de escritorio y barra de tareas NO reconocían el programa al que estaban apuntando que antes no estaba pero ahora sí. La hostia, oiga.

Aún me queda por quitarle Skype corporativo que ella tampoco utiliza y que se abre siempre, quieras o no, al iniciar sesión. Curiosamente no aparece como aplicación instalada (curioso para mí, que soy rarito para estas cosas) aunque sí aparece mencionado cuando abres el menú ese que está abajo a la izquierda e incluso te indica que puedes desinstalarlo. Pues guay, ¿no? Pues no, porque te abre el navegador de archivos en un directorio concreto y allá te las compongas.

Supongo que estará instalado junto con el Office y habrá que decirle que, joder, NO se abra en cada comienzo de sesión. Como ella tenía que irse pues lo hemos dejado para otro momento. Al menos ha recuperado el Chrome y el sistema va más fluido. Y únicamente se aprecia porque no hay que andar cerrando ventanitas.

Ah, y en la barra del sistema, la de abajo y lo digo porque no sé si hay más, también aparece el tiempo, la cotización del IBEX, el tráfico y noticias de salseo (Nuria Roca te enseña cómo debes ir vestida a trabajar, por ejemplo) entre otras cosas. No veo forma de eliminarlo pero al menos he podido quitar lo del IBEX y las noticias. Esta chica, rozando el medio siglo, no tiene mucho interés en que la enseñen ahora cómo vestir. Me ha dicho que ya sabe. Y yo la creo.

Y ya. No me extraña que tantos y tantos informáticos aprecien y promocionen windows como sistema. Tienen trabajo para siempre jamás.

CC: @joseli@mastodon.social

Black Friday is approaching, so remember: Buying shit on Amazon is part of how we got here. Quit giving money to billionaires and corporations.

Buy used, buy hand made, support a local creator, make something yourself.

End consumerism.

Se la conocía como «la ciudad de las corrientes de agua». Y este mural, que tiene el texto «fui sobre agua edificada, mis muros de fuego son», hace referencia a eso. Lo de los «muros de fuego» viene de que las murallas eran de pedernal, y los flechazos contra ella soltaban chispas.

Alt...

Foto de un trampantojo en la plaza de Puerta Cerrada en Madrid, con el texto mencionado arriba

CC: @The_Whore_of_Blahbylon@mastodon.social

"Work harder, monkey!"

Everyone, have a nice day!

America is now at the stage of the game of Monopoly where it's obvious who has won because they own everything, but you have to keep going round and round the board while they drain the last of your money from you.

This is the point where some people choose to flip the board.

Y los del grupo de teatro en el que estoy, que le quedan dos telediarios conmigo a este paso, me dicen que me relaje, que me tranquilice, que siempre puede ser peor.

Me cago en todo.

Claro que puede ser peor. ¿Y qué? ¿Dejamos de lado cualquier queja porque siempre puede ser peor? ¿Qué chorrada es esa?

En fin, que luego, cuando me vaya, se preguntarán qué ha pasado; me lo preguntarán a mí, se lo explicaré y, ¿sabéis qué? Que terminarán diciéndome que estas cosas "hay que hablarlas".

When I die please mix my ashes with concrete, then turn me into a brick and throw me at an Amazon Warehouse

I've been disappointed to see journalists I respect sticking with Twitter, but the more dangerous Musk gets, the less I can maintain that respect.

No offense, but the more I hear of what has been done in the name of being “socially conservative” in the US, the more it seems to be bigotry with a bow on it. Racism, misogyny, homophobia and now transphobia.

And it feels infuriatingly disingenuous to call clinging to hate and subjugation as “trying to conserve” anything.

If all you want to “conserve” is your systemically enforced supremacy, then you’re just an oppressive asshole.

Ok, fine, I’ll take back the “no offense”.

Pro tip: if you cover the display on your appliances with a piece of tape, you never have to reset the clock.

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

#Spain

#snac #fediverse

I have to stop posting active links to our content on Mastodon.

Every time I do so now, it brings down our website for up to 5 minutes.

We've tried pretty much every claimed fix, including third party caching (which in turn breaks other elements of our website's dynamic display abilities), code changes and such on our back end code, and more stuff I don't understand at all (but have spent money paying our WP developer to implement). None of it has worked.

The #fediverse powers that be need to fix this growing problem of the #MastoDDos effect on websites. The more followers and more servers your followers are from, the more impact this has on literally bringing a website to its knees with all the DB calls.

For instance, this morning, I posted the lovely article our creative writer Ethan wrote, which ended up only getting 2 boosts and one "favourite" here, but it brought down our website for 4 minutes and 12 seconds.

That's not sustainable.

If you've noticed that the Mastodon stampede DDoS is back, hammering your servers even though you have applied countermeasures -- that's because they CHANGED THEIR FUCKING USER AGENT for no good reason and without telling anybody.

Ok, yes, technically the plans were on display in a toilet with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".

Prepend "^Mastodon\/|" to your regexps.

Sigh.

https://jwz.org/b/ykb4

Alt...

Screenshot

"[...] cada vez se investiga más cómo este agotamiento afecta a quienes cuidan de otros, ya sean personas o animales no humanos"

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

CC: @stefano@bsd.cafe

CC: @ricardo@bsd.cafe