Recent content on Paco Hope
In The Guardian opinion pages Schneier, who otherwise is a cybersecurity luminary and visionary, co-authors a staggeringly bad article suggesting that there’s some reason to nationalise major AI labs if, as they are very likely to do, they catastrophically fail as a private business.
I post my own blog about shitty Verizon service, because let’s face it: they don’t care.
Someone who works with me has started ‘coding’ for the first time. They’ve built something that is visually very appealing. And since it works for them on their laptop, they think they’ve really done something remarkable. It’s hard to help them be realistic without looking like I’m taking a huge dump on their work.
If you start your Mattermost Team Edition using email and password for users, but then you change your mind and switch to GitLab authentication, it’s not at all obvious or easy how to convert the existing users. If you are comfortable monkeying around in postgres, this blog will tell you what to do.
Wheres the AI Beef? This post provides some counterpoints to common AI boosters who like to send around lists of very smart people talking happily about AI.
A poem I wrote about AI
Ask an LLM for any information on how to do security in Amazon S3, and you’ll get a bunch of crap. There just happens to be this one change to how S3 works that shows clearly the effect of frequency on LLM training data. I show you how cutoff dates and LLM’s reliance on frequency lead to bad results in LLM output.
First Ai Coding Impression
2024 was the year that I shifted my support toward individual creators and causes. So I’ve been trying to spend my money on causes, systems, services, and people who support the future that I want. I do not support AI and I don’t support anyone whose primary contribution is using or promoting AI. I’m trying to make the world a better place by supporting people who help people.
These are my notes from migrating my iRedMail server from a MySQL-based installation to an LDAP-based installation. This blog has a bunch of scripts that turn SQL queries into LDIF files that will create the LDAP structures you need.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have really obvious limitations. I don’t see how we build a brighter, better future using models that are unable to escape the frequency distribution of our past.
I bought prescription sunglasses from Frames Direct. They promote themselves as a high quality, designer glasses retailer and great customer service. My experience was anything but e-commerce. It was very human and very slow, in ways that basic online shopping solved ages ago. This is a point-by-point dissection of my shopping experience and where they let me down.
I get a lot of people at work proposing various apps built on generative AI and large language models. I have a few principles that I tend to apply when I tell them whether I think it’s a good idea or not. I figured I’d write them down in a blog post. It’s 3 principles: 1. AI can’t help you do something you don’t know how to do. 2. AI is only good when both the input…
Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion on their platforms. In the Meta-verse, where it is virtually impossible to connect with a human being, rules are rules, and it appears they would prefer to suppress anything that might prove problematic for them. This is a repost of an article that Facebook apparently won’t let people share. Maybe you can share this blog…
I did a bit of research into the reason why we all think pirates say ‘Arrr!’. Here’s the reason and a little clip.
I kinda wish people would raise awareness of how wasteful AI is and how much completely pointless garbage is going into AI training.
I noticed that the NVidia device drivers were making tons of blocked DNS requests. I figured out how to stop them.
I got an AppleTV recently, and suddenly my pihole ad blocker was seeing literally 500 DNS requests every 10 minutes from this thing. I looked into why.
I figured out how to get an Inky Frame displaying a daily set of activities, including a calendar, the weather, and the state of various home automation things. There are A LOT of parts to this, and I learned a few tricks along the way.
I hereby confirm my request to remove my name permanently from the lists that the Consumer Credit Reporting Companies, Equifax, Experian, Innovis and TransUnion, provide to businesses that send firm (preapproved / prescreened) offers of credit or insurance.
Ripping Blu-ray Discs is easy. Finding the resources you need is not.
These are English rules to a game called «Kolejka» from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance
My implementation of Luke Plausin’s clever solution. Using the s3api command, you can actually create an object at the directory marker and write HTML to it. There are a lot of advantages to this and a handful of disadvantages to it. It lets you make CloudFront and S3 static web sites behave a lot more like websites run by nginx and Apache.
This is a way to install macOS catalina, sierra, high sierra, big sur, monterey, or mojave directly from Apple. Older operating system versions are hard to get, but if you need them, this will do it.
My favourite chilli chutney recipe, inspired by Jamie Oliver
I tried to get a company to delete an account. Their response was so bad it was hilarious.
I got a ceiling fan connected to Home Assistant using Tasmota firmware on an iFan03. Here’s a few bits about how I did that.
A classic, funny poem set to The Night Before Christmas that has been floating around the internet anonymously for 30+ years.
I’m doing what I can to support communities of colour. I matched $2500 of other people’s donations to organisations like the National Bail Fund Network.
I do a lot of meetings online and I’ve been doing it a long time. There are a few behaviours that you can do to make them easier and more successful.
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Waiving Rights With a Click
What does it mean to tip in the gig economy? Having lived in Europe where tipping is relatively rare, to the US where tipping is pervasive, I’ve started confronting what tipping means.
I’m playing a bit of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition lately. They’ve “simplified” a lot of things, which sometimes feels like dumbing down, sometimes feels like removing the grind, and sometimes feels like a welcome shift.
I made a Google Doodle Johann Sebastian Bach line and then pulled it in to Logic Pro to see what I could do with it.
I’m loading CloudTrail events from S3 into Elasticsearch so that I can search them and visualise them. I do this automatically with a Lambda function. I also wrote a python program to bulk-upload CloudTrail into ElasticSearch. The code is on github.
This is my first ever fictional short story called Terms and Conditions .
In working on the new blog, I discovered even more old MP3 recordings of my college bands. The band was a one-gig-wonder we called The Motor Boys.
This should tell you absolutely everything you need to know to create and host a static web site that is HTTPS, modern, and serverless.
After many years running WordPress, I have finally given up. I really don’t need a server or a content management software. I’m doing a simple static blog with Hugo and CloudFront. Here’s how.
I’ve been thinking about how to make social media practical and usable by kids. Back when I was experimenting with app.net, I wrote a blog on how it could be used safely with kids . Well, app.net died. But maybe Mastodon will succeed where it failed. No social platform yet has made a decent set of tools for being kid-friendly but Mastodon could create one. This blog post is a rewrite of my…
I was working on my bash prompt recently. I think I’ve settled on some defaults that I quite like. I figured I’d share it with the world. For the TL;DR it’s: export PS1 = '\n\e[01;32m\w\e[0m\n: \u@\h ; ' export PS2 = '\e[4m\011\e[0m '
In 2003 a Belgian election anomaly investigation shrugged. In 2017 it’s described as cosmic rays hacking our elections. Ridiculous.
There has been a lot of noise lately about Bill Gates statements around taxing robots.
Is it possible to cross an international border and not give up all your data to law enforcement? If so, how?
System-wide Unique Passwords (SWUP) Here’s a possible security control, prompted by @westmaaan ’s Tweet . I call it “system-wide unique passwords” or SWUP for short. When users create accounts or change their passwords, the system should make sure that no two users have the same password on the system. ladies and gentlemen pic.x.com/F84ETL7Cwe — Christian Westman (@westmaaan) 15 October 2016
Because I work in information security, I deal with passwords a lot. There is a really simple guide to making good passwords: longer is stronger . If you remember nothing else, simply remember longer is stronger .
I saw a really great article called “ Blue Feed, Red Feed, See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side ” on the Wall Street Journal. It has an important implicit bias that hurts us all.
Game developers generally ignore parental controls when they develop games. Sony permits these games to connect to PSN and to operate in an all-or-nothing mode. The parental controls don’t matter because games will only play if all parental controls are disabled. This completely undermines the entire point of the parental controls. Parents get a choice: allow kids the full adult experience…
I keep coming back to the gunpolicy.org chart of Australia gun deaths . One of the interpretations of this chart i hear is “well, gun deaths were already trending down anyway.” That’s obviously true. But let’s talk about the impact of the law.