Recent content in Forever Debugging on sakana.fr
LLMs aren’t just chatbots anymore. Once you give them tools, they stop suggesting and start acting. This piece explores the real—and often overlooked—risks of giving LLMs the ability to affect the world.
Understanding Large Language Models: Tokens, Limits, and the Path to AGI Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, power many of the AI tools we use today. These models are trained on vast amounts of text data and predict the most likely next word in a sentence based on context. At their core, LLMs break down text into tokens , the building blocks of language processing. A token might be a word,…
El Salvador’s Bitcoin Experiment: A Missed Opportunity? In 2021, El Salvador made history as the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. President Nayib Bukele touted the move as a bold step towards financial inclusion, attracting foreign investment, and reducing reliance on traditional financial systems. The initiative included the rollout of a government-backed Bitcoin…
Analyzing Bitcoin’s Historical Peaks and Projecting Future Prices Bitcoin, the pioneer cryptocurrency, has shown remarkable growth since its inception, with its price often reaching new heights during its market cycles. In this analysis, we focus on Bitcoin’s major all-time highs (ATH) and investigate whether its peak prices follow a discernible pattern. Using a linear trend derived from the…
Hybris is a very widely used platform for eCommerce. It is a somewhat complex piece of software, with multiple interacting components. When trying to obtain optimal performance, there are a few guidelines you’ll need to follow. We’ll review them in this post.
Those are my notes regarding the podcast episode “ The Random Show, Ice Cold Edition ” of the Tim Ferriss Show.
We must invest our hopes not in the things that happen, but in our capacities to face them as human beings — Keith Seddon
Everything flows; nothing remains –Heraclitus
One of the very worst use of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all. — Brian Tracy
If you’ve been wondering how to delete a package you mistakenly installed (or which is no longer needed) along with all its dependencies, here’s a neat way to achieve just that. The idea is that whenever you use yum to perform some operation on packages, a transaction is created. If you installed a package along with its dependencies, then you can undo just that by undoing that transaction.
If you feel like running a full bitcoin node on your Fedora Linux server (and it’s a great way to help the bitcoin network if you have spare capacity / bandwidth), you’ll need to update the firewalld rules in order to allow foreign nodes to connect to yours. Here’s how…
Creating an image in Docker is rather easy and well documented. You start by editing a file which describes the image, then run a few commands, and voilà . In this post we’ll cover how to create a very basic Docker image which will let us spawn elasticsearch instances very easily.
Just because I struggle every time to find how to do that, here’s the procedure to delete an event without responding : Click on events Click on the event you want to get rid of In the guest list you’ll see yourself as well as your invited friends. There’s a cross beside your name. Click on it to remove yourself BAM ! DONE !
The goal of this tutorial is to show you how to create an encrypted LVM on Linux. This will help you keep your data safe in the event of, for example, your laptop computer being stolen.
Here are a couple of pointers to perform an installation of OpenBSD on a media which will be read-only most of the times. I hope I didn’t forget anything otherwise I’ll be in trouble next time I reinstall… 🙂
Or why you usually use ls -l *txt without quotes, but use quotes in find . -name “*txt” .
Spotify is a great way to listen to music. Unfortunately the official client only runs on Windows and Mac machines. There is an experimental unsupported client for linux, however it’s provided as a DEB (ubuntu/debian) package. Here’s a gross hack for whom is desperate to get it working on Gentoo.
… or anyone else really, with a little trick to implement a black list and filter unwanted callers.
GoogleVoice (GV for short) is a great service (I won’t go into the details, but you can read up about it here ), but it is unfortunately accessible only if you are in the USA. Granted there is already plenty of documentation about how to circumvent this, but I’m not aware of any of those using Asterisk. So this post will document how to sign up for a GV account as well as how to use it with…
A non-printing character is a character which won’t actually get directly printed (or displayed) but rather interpreted. Such non-printing characters are for example line-feed or tabulation. The interpretation of those characters can differ from one system to the next. For example the line-feed character is different on Unix or DOS. If you need an easy way to confirm that a text file is DOS or…
If like me you get tons of telemarketers calls, there’s an easy way to get rid of them with a quick Asterisk hack. The following Asterisk configuration snippet will immediately send any hidden caller ID (99% telemarketers, and I have a general policy of not picking up the phone for hidden caller ID anyway) to a holding music making them waste money and time…
This post is meant to clarify a few key concepts about Unix filesystems such as directory permissions, hardlinks and symlinks.
MisterHouse is a fantastic home automation software with an impressive out-of-the-box feature set, and it only gets better if you know a bit of Perl. You can conveniently set “modes”, which are settings with states you can define and use. You can then fire events upon state change, and so are they very useful to define some sort of macros. A few examples : the “Security” mode could be “on” or…
In this post I’ll revisit the classical “ how to remap caps lock into something useful ” once again. In this post, I’ll show how to remap the caps lock key to have an extra Escape key, which is very useful for all VI/Vim users.
The following sample Facebook desktop application exports your friends birthdays in a vCard file format. This file is suitable to be imported into your GMail contacts for example.
One of the common annoyances of copy-pasting on Windows is that it tries to copy-paste the formatting as well. This issue can easily be fixed by the following AutoHotkey macro, which will copy the selection to the clipboard as pure text.
Asterisk is a free telephony software. I’m posting here sample commented configuration files for reference purposes, hoping they will help you get kickstarted if needed. This config sets up : SIP phones (for softphones or harware phones with SIP capabilities) Voice mails A few test phone numbers Forwarding of calls to a SIP provider for outbound and incoming calls (from/to PSTN) That should be…
I’m running an OpenVPN server, configured in bridging mode. I had quite a bit of trouble getting OpenVPN to start after networking is up, but before the the bridge is setup so that the tap0 device, which is created by OpenVPN can be added to the bridge. The solution is simpler : let the tap0 be automatically created and added to the bridge by Gentoo Linux, then start OpenVPN with a config file…
One of the features of bash I’ve too long overlooked is its history expansion. In this post I’ll show a few examples to get a grip at it.
This Perl one-liner is intended to print the 10 most frequent client IP addresses in an Apache log file. It can easily be recycled to count anything, though.
If you’re looking for CPU usage statistics and system performance on IBM AIX, sar might just be the tool your looking for. It’ll display information for 5 minutes intervals from midnight to current time. The output looks like this :
This code snippet demonstrates how easy it is to collect your twitter @mentions in Perl, coupled with curl for simplicity.
When working as a systems administrator, you’ll always end up having to solve a file system full error in a hurry. Here are a few commands and hints to help you get out of it quickly on a UNIX like system.
Sometimes automatically running scripts in production environments are simply monitored by emails. Those scripts may run on schedule or be triggered by events and they send an email (for example to the technical support level 1) upon completion of the job. The content of the email will then give information about the outcome of the execution of the script. This posts lists a few ideas that you…
Firefox will load whatever URL is in the copy-paste buffer in the page if you middle click somewhere on a page. My mouse’s wheel also serves as the middle button, and I found it really annoying that when occasionally middle-clicking while scrolling the page, Firefox would try to load another page … You can control this behaviour with this about:config property middlemouse.contentLoadURL . Set to…
Finance::Quote is a Perl module which can be used to obtain stock information from various internet sources. I thought I’d rather share this code snippet as an example showing how easy it is to use, before I turn it into a bloatware with an SQL backend to compute average price per share and what not 🙂 So here is a simple snippet demonstrating how to get the price of a stock :
If there’s a file installed on your disk for which you’d like to know what package provided it, you can use the equery command like below :
If you’ve got a VirtualBox VM already installed and you wish to clone/copy it, follow the steps below :
If you need to export ZFS volumes through CIFS, follow this simple step by step procedure.
In OpenSolaris, switching to the /dev development branch is a bit like switching to the testing branch for some linux distros. So you might want to think twice before doing so, as it might sometimes break things. If you still want to do that, follow those instructions :
You need to have read/write permissions to /dev/dri/cardX to benefit from 3D hardware acceleration in Xorg X Server. On a Gentoo linux machine, this file has the following permissions set by default : ls -l /dev/dri/card0 crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 2009-10-14 16:12 /dev/dri/card0
If you use Gentoo and tried to install Cacti with Lighttpd instead of Apache, chances are that you ran into this error message : /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/WebappConfig/content.py:27: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead import md5, re, os, os.path * Fatal error: Your configuration file sets the server type "Apache" * Fatal error: but the corresponding…
There is currently a little bug in Xfce4 which prevents you to bind the key combinations involving SPACE and ESCAPE. For example you can’t bind - , but you can bind -C . This behaviour affects only the xfce-keyboard-settings GUI, which is annoying but leaves us with a workaround using the following command line :
The Xorg X Server can now rely on HAL to get information about the hardware the machine is running. This allows the X Server to auto-configure most of its components such as keyboard / mouse / screen / graphic adapter. But there is still room for tweaking it if needed. This post explains how to configure extra properties for a keyboard at the HAL level, so that X Server will correctly…
Conky is a lightweight system monitoring tool. It has many built-in probes (processor load, memory usage, temperature sensors, etc), but it is still pretty easy to extend it if you don’t find the feature you need. In this post I’ll describe my Conky setup and explain how to extend it to monitor your rTorrent downloads. rTorrent is a great BitTorrent client which offers an XML-RPC interface to its…
rTorrent is a very efficient BitTorrent client for linux. It has a very small memory footprint, a very customizable configuration file, and exposes it’s internals through XML-RPC. This is convenient to implement 3rd party GUI or web interfaces. Let’s see how to setup and use XML-RPC to probe rTorrent downloads.
The “modeline” is a common way to set (or override) VIM settings on a file by file basis. Let’s see a few of the key concepts of the VIM modeline.
I have 3 hard disks in SATA-to-eSATA external enclosure which I occasionally need to plug to perform backups and to unplug when done. I found it annoying to have to restart the whole computer at every turn, especially when SATA is supposed to bring hotplug abilities. If you mainboard / SATA chipset and disks support hot plugging and unplugging, you can do this by following those instructions.
There is a feature in OpenSSH since v3.9 which allows multiple SSH connections with the same caracteristics (host, port, remote login) to be made through a single TCP connection. This is useful because you’ll have to authenticate only once, and besides the new SSH connections will be much faster to establish.
My new center of interest those days being virtualization, I tried quite a few software starting with Xen, then QEMU, then KVM, and finally VirtualBox. But as far as giving a network access to the VM is concerned, I’ve always sticked to a network bridge for the reason that this makes the VM appear on the network just like any other computer of your network. This post provided a sample script to…