@jgoerzen@floss.social
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

jgoerzen

@jgoerzen@floss.social

Hacker, dad, pilot, amateur radio operator, activist, guy that is susceptible to new hobbies. Former president of Software in the Public Interest.

I live miles from the nearest paved road in #Kansas.

Interests: #rust #debian #linux #pilot #flying #hamradio #emacs #orgmode #kansas #floss #kansas #raspberrypi #programming #parenting #retrocomputing

SRE at Google. I do not speak for my employer; views expressed here are my own.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jgoerzen, to security
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

My advice to consider first when evaluating systems: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10620-consider-security-first This is part of my decision to migrate my devices to running pure .

jgoerzen, to random
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

This Christmas, I wrote an game for my kids. It's my first IF effort, and they seemed to enjoy it! You can play or download "The Grumpy Cricket (And Other Enormous Creatures)" from https://www.complete.org/the-grumpy-cricket/ or see the blog post at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10618-the-grumpy-cricket-and-other-enormous-creatures . It's released under the GPL v3.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@matt The three of them played together, with my middle child at the keyboard. They were using my old vt510 connected to a Raspberry Pi running frotz.

jgoerzen, to debian
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

I'm getting so annoyed at . It lags terribly behind , and even worse, they put so little effort into release engineering that a REINSTALL is required for every major new version. For little embedded things that sit around in various corners of the house, shed, or hangar, that's painful.

Since I have to do a reinstall anyhow, I think I'll switch them all to proper at this point.

jgoerzen, to OpenAI
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

protip:

My general philosophy is, if "everyone" is talking about something, that's a good reason to ignore it. It works with who Taylor Switft is dating and also with the OpenAI board.

We've all been using AI for years. It's open source in and . Google Translate is one of the most useful travel tools I've ever used, and everybody has forgotten the utility of live translation of conversations because now a bot can do high school homework incorrectly.

1/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

This policy worked pretty well for me with the Blockchain and Web 3.0 hype also. When mainstream journalists are writing breathless articles about something, that's a good time to tune out.

This rule isn't perfect. They did also write breathless articles about the "information superhighway" and the Internet did turn out to be a lasting thing. But I theorize that this rule becomes more apropos as media becomes more about attention and less about facts.

2/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

Meanwhile, some wealthy people somewhere are getting fired or getting hired or dating or something. The best reaction, for me individually and for the planet, is for us all to go "meh".

Meanwhile, I've got some more Doctorow books to read. I hear someone is leaving town, and that promises to be a lot more interesting! /end

jgoerzen, to mastodon
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

I wrote a new blog post: it's more important to recognize what direction people are moving than where they are. It responds to a few yellings-at I've received or witnessed here on , generally with people whose general opinions and goals are shared. https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10605-its-more-important-to-recognize-what-direction-people-are-moving

evan, (edited ) to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

I'm having a hard time writing polls.

I don't know what to post or how to speak.

I'm going to take a break for a while.

UPDATE: I'm very upset about Gaza. Posting in wartime feels very off. I'm trying to find my authentic voice for this time.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@evan This made me think about what I always wanted to know about Fediverse users.

And, therefore: https://floss.social/@jgoerzen/111344667504049382

ajroach42, to random
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

It is cheesy as all getout but I love the way cool retro term looks on the gpd win.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@dpflug @ajroach42 @beto As the original author of , it's always fun to see it mentioned. I'm no longer an active developer on the project, but I still use it for all my mail.

Speaking of which, my other suggestions are and . also; it's one of the few things that works well with the XON/XOFF that some real vt220 and such require. I do own a WY55, vt220, vt420, and vt510 and periodically work from them. Amazing focus mode.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@dpflug @ajroach42 @beto Here are photos of my in action.

  1. The login prompt to the Raspberry Pi it's connected to.

  2. Reading debian-devel in in .

  3. Browsing this thread in toot.

  4. The was their first terminal to accept a PC keyboard with a PS/2 port. Here I have an IBM clicky keyboard hooked up, because I never liked the DEC layout. Also on the vt510, I can remap keys, so ctrl is where it is supposed to be - left of A.

A vt510 terminal from the 1990s connected to a Raspberry Pi running Linux. The screen is showing a summary of emails in mu4e, a mail reader for Emacs.
A vt510 terminal from the 1990s connected to a Raspberry Pi running Linux. The screen is showing this thread in the toot CLI client.
A vt510 terminal from the 1990s connected to a Raspberry Pi running Linux. Connected to it is an IBM keyboard.

jgoerzen, to haskell
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

Learning a new language: . Going to write a simple text adventure for my 6-year-old (to play with some assistance).

What a weird language. I think I like it though. It is, at the very least, a tremendous improvement over .

I can't help but think that would be an excellent language in which to write . However, I don't have the time to write a whole library for it.

It seems like a lot of modern authoring systems target web. Sigh.

jgoerzen, to ai
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

OK folks, it's time to talk . I'm with Neil here - he hits the nail right on the head: https://youtu.be/5Qon72VKH30?feature=shared&t=172

I've even worked for an company. It was a bit stunning how little people cared about before , and how much people suddenly care about it now. People think AI is new.

C'mon now. We've had facial recognition issues for years. Google Translate can do OCR on a restaurant menu and translate it in near real time. Remember Deep Blue beating us in chess? 1/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

. I've not used AI for programming. AT ALL. I mean, why would I? Maybe it's good at writing boilerplate code... but then if you're using a language that requires tons of boilerplate, maybe the problem lies elsewhere. (Sorry )

But if I ask AI to write some code, then I have to review it carefully, understand how it works, integrate it with my program... even if it got it right the first time, that's harder than just writing it myself. 2/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

. "But John," you say. "What if I don't know HOW to do the thing yet? Wouldn't it be nice for AI to show me the way?"

Oh sure, that would be nice. But, have you tried this? How often is it correct? If you want to learn, you should learn from something that is human-reviewed - a book with a good editor, even stackexchange. Not an AI that is prone to hallucinations, and in response to every prompt I can give it, can't write English better than a middle-schooler. 3/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

The " helps me learn programming" argument just falls flat to me. You're going to be learning authoritative-sounding stuff that is likely incorrect in multiple areas.

We've had sites for THAT around for ages. We don't need AI for it.

4/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

What is useful for then? Well, we have had a lot of experience with AI. Let's start with non-LLM AI Classification problems -- everything from text to image recognition and such. We've had OCR, map-routing algorithms, etc.

LLMs make for an interesting twist on search. I sometimes ask for something; recently it has been getting good at writing some stuff and, crucially, citing sources. It probably got me to a good source faster than my own search terms could have. Nice. 5/

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

. My point is: AI didn't begin last year. It has its uses and it has its shortcomings. Like other technologies, it will bring about some changes.

It is neither earth-shattering nor something to be ignored. It is simply something that exists.

/end

jgoerzen, to random
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

In a weak moment, it occurred to me that #Syncthing might be a #CRDT database. I think it upholds most, if not all, properties (especially if one assumes the content of a file won't be modified after creation). I need to look at it in more detail yet, but I'm enjoying this concept.

jgoerzen, to random
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

Well. The domain registrar I've used for years, gandi, has gone through a series of ownership changes and has drastically raised rates on . Looking for a new home that is privacy-respecting.

Several of them seem to not let you run your own nameservers anymore (ugh). offered to let them run the , let me run the primary and they run the secondary, or run it all myself. I always had them as secondary and that worked quite well. Anyone else still do this?

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@Anarcat Well I do run bind in a VM, or did you mean using a cloud service for DNS itself? If so, which one?

My hesitancy with those are generally two-fold:

  1. How very much harder it is to make changes on some web UI than in text files I can edit with sed and track with git;

  2. How difficult it is to migrate to some other service. For domains with only a couple of A records, it's not a big deal, but I have this obsession with not breaking links since 2000 and my zone file is complicated.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@Anarcat Ahh. I could do that too, I suppose. Good point. I may have to look up some of those services...

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@Anarcat Thank you. And interesting article there, thanks for that also.

Actually, I should have said: more important than secondary are a stable platform and a reasonable ToS and privacy. Gandi seemed to be above average on the latter, at least a few years ago (not sure if that's the case now)

AbandonedAmerica, to random
@AbandonedAmerica@mastodon.social avatar

It's kind of an amazing and horrifying phenomenon, no? I'm in the same boat. Having used computers throughout most of my life, it's disorienting to see gaping holes where seemingly dependable resources used to be. That, or a paywall.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@AbandonedAmerica I'm very interested in context or examples here!

publicvoit, to NixOS
@publicvoit@graz.social avatar

This weekend I re-installed my business notebook with #NixOS.

I guess I'll write a blog article about my NixOS adventure some day.

Sneak preview: not everything is great when you migrate from decades of deb-based distros to NixOS. Things that work OOTB with normal distros can consume hours to debug for me. 😔

Let's see about the long-term aspects.

At least this concludes my #Xubuntu era for good. Only one Debian stable left (that'll be a hard nut to crack) besides my two new NixOS hosts.

jgoerzen,
@jgoerzen@floss.social avatar

@publicvoit I found your article at https://karl-voit.at/2023/09/12/nix/ on the strengths and weaknesses of (and your comments about ) and comparison to and . Very informative and helpful. Thanks!

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