troglodyne.net : /index
No, not that PCP. Nor "Praise, Correct Praise". Perl::Critic::Policy. The core issue when dealing with LLM tooling to generate programs is the same problem working with other people. Unstated preferences means you get output which is unacceptable, but understandable because mind-reading is beyond both. Encoding this in things like skills is still not enough. Just like with your own internal wiki…
Really not much to it, 0 downtime: migrate.sh virsh blockcopy --transient-job --domain $MYDOMAIN --path $SOURCE --dest $DEST virsh blockjob $MYDOMAIN --info --path $SOURCE #...wait until the above says it's 100% done, $MYDEVICE is going to be vda,vdb etc based on what disk it was virsh blockjob $MYDOMAIN $MYDEVICE --pivot
BIMI is a standard wherein you slap in yet another TXT record to specify the avatar to use in mail clients for your domain's email accounts. There's one troublesome bit though. The "Verified Mark Certificate", which is basically a Bag on the Side saying this is definitely for sure not spoofed. The trouble is, only HTTPS URIs are allowed, and mail clients surely won't allow self-signed certs. As…
The latest trend in Backprop network users is the idea of "agent swarms", with some being so sophisticated as to replicate an entire firm in miniature (gas city, wuphf, et al). The basic idea is that you can drive out errors by making the agents take on different roles, much like in the firm, so that they can form adversarial networks. Similarly different weights and starting seeds among the…
Had to update a bunch of client systems lately due to our AI enabled storm of 0-days coming in hard not long ago. This of course means that configs get stomped by hurtful package maintainers. In this particular case, it was dovecot and postfix's mailbox dirs. On one system I thought I had been particularly tricky in symlinking the dir the maintainer prefers to the actual dir, but they nuked it and…
There is a creeping realization among heavy LLM using firms that these technologies make their productivity problem worse, not better. The practical consequence of this is that despite their transformative power, they are very much in a market bubble. Like the web, this means the real fun starts after the bubble pops and people figure out how to actually use these things for good. The core issue…
Tl;Dr: Claude is the best, but would be better if they called it Clod, as that would be truth in advertising. Any of you who have listened to my talk at the science perl track back in '24 may be aware that I mentioned AGI is not possible with the transformer approach. I believe I also mentioned it in the associated paper, which you can find here . My use of these technologies has simply confirmed…
The core reason why selinux and other mandatory access control schemes have failed is because they do not integrate well into developer workflows. As such the only parties which implement it are large organizations with infinite resources to hurl at such a problem. Everyone else turns them off because it's far, far too much work; even for distro package maintainers. seccomp-eBPF changed all of…
Those of you who don't lurk the various perl5 groups on social media or P5P may be unaware that there are a number of problems with CPAN, largely with regard to how namespaces are doled out. Essentially the first distribution to claim it gets to squat there forever, whether you like it or not. If the maintainer does not wish for new patches to ever be added, such as is the case with DBIX::Class,…
Internet people love to spray their feelings about everything under the sun at every passerby. Perl, being a programming language, is no exception. At the end of the day, all the sound and fury signifies nothing. While I've largely laid out my perspective on this subject here , I suspect it's not quite the engagement bait people crave. Here's some red meat. The reality is that multi-bilion dollar…
We have released to the CPAN a package that implements some of the parts of Net::OpenSSH that were left as "an exercise to the reader." This is based on Andy and my experiences over at cPanel's QA department among other things. It differs in important ways from what was used in the QA department there (they also have moved on to a less bespoke testing framework nowadays): It is a "true" subclass,…
In short, do what is suggested here . For the long version, this is a problem because terraform absolutely insists on total hamfisted control of its resources, including libvirt pools. This means that it must create a new one which is necessarily outside of the realm of it's apparmor rules. As such you have to turn that stuff off in the libvirt config file. Important stuff now that I'm using it to…
Suppose you do a common thing like a mapping into a hash but decide to filter the input first: shit.pl my %hash = map { "here" => $_ } grep { -d $_ } qw{a b c d .}; This claims there is a syntax eror on line 6 where the grep starts. This is a clear violation of the principle of least-astonishment as both the map and grep work by themselves when not chained. We can fix this by assigning $_ like so:…
I wanted to be a pilot as a young man. While I did learn to fly, I ended up a mathematician, programmer and tester. Even then I am incredibly frustrated by corporate pathologies which prevent progress and meaningful improvement at the firms and industries I interact with. But it's nothing compared to the dead hand which smothers "General Aviation", which is how you learn to fly if you aren't one…
rm /var/named/_default.nzd In short, you have to nuke the zone database with the remote zone that says "HEY IM DA MASTA" when you have the local zone going "NUH UH, ME MASTER". This means you'll have to manually rebuild all the remote zones, tough shit. There is no other solution, as there's no safe way to actually putz with the binary version of _default.nzf. Seasoned BIND hands would tell you…
Despite being the worst attended YAPC in recent memory, 2024's show in Vegas had some of the best talks in a long while. In no particular order, the ones I remember after a week are: Damian's talk - Implements most of what you want out of a type system in perl, one of the points in my testing talk Demetrios's talk - Savings from this alone will save me more than the conference cost me Gavin Hayes'…
Back when I worked at cPanel, I implemented a feature to have customer virtualhosts automatically redirect to SSL if they had a valid cert and were configured to re-up it via LetsEncrypt (or other providers). However this came with a significant caveat -- it could not work on servers where the operator overrode our default vhost template. There is no way you can sanely inject rules into an…
Today I submitted a minor patch for File::Slurper::Temp . Unfortunately the POD there doesn't tell you why you would want to use this module. Here's why. It implements the 'rename-in-place' pattern for editing files. This is useful when you have multiple processes reading from a file which may be written to at any time. That roughly aligns with "any non-trivial perl application". I'm sure this…
I try not to ever get political if I can help it here, as that's always the wrong kind of attention for a business to attract. However I'm going to have to today, as the eye of sauron is directly affixed on my industry today. If that's not for you, I encourage you to skip this article. As of this writing, there is a proposed rule change working its way through the bowels of the Department of…
There's a problem with most of the mail providers recently requiring SPF+DKIM+DMARC. Lots of MTAs (exchange, mailman etc) are notorious for rewriting emails for a variety of reasons. This naturally breaks DKIM, as they don't have the needed private key to sign messages which they are forwarding. And given the nature of the email oligopoly means you absolutely have to be under the protection of one…
I've told a number of people that large language models are essentially Clever Hans as a service. These transformers are taking a prompting by the user, and then producing a chain of the most likely tokens to satisfy said prompt. Which is to say, they will (unless altered by "safety" filters like the commercial offerings) simply tell you what you want to hear. Early versions of these models like…
While it seems trivially obvious that the hosting industry is engaged in building "houses for data", be they commercial (full service webmasters), residential (dedi) or multi-family (shared), the parallels run deeper than that. The same structural defects holding back real estate largely constrain hosting as well. For instance, most hosting shops at the small scale (dedi/shared) provide an…
Net::Server is the backend for most popular PSGI servers on CPAN, such as starman. In shared hosting environments, it's a common pattern to have the www files owned by the relevant user, with the group being www-data, or whatever the HTTPd uses to access things. In the context of a reverse-proxy to a PSGI server, you can be a bit more strict by having only the AF_UNIX socket given the www group.…
Web Components are a matter of particular amusement given many are coming back to the realization that the best way to build modular websites is via server-side templating for a variety of good reasons. This bad idea then becomes worse via shadow DOM reliance and randomizing the CSS classnames & IDs to prevent collisions when having multiple instances of the same component on a page. This pretty…
In an earlier essay, I went over the sticky reality that is the CA infrastructure . I'd like to discuss a related subject, which is why nobody uses client certificates to restrict access to and authenticate users of websites, despite them being "supported" by browsers for many years. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, it goes like this: I issue a certificate for $USER, just like you…