RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mxshift/116672624747265790 I would say that this is almost certainly the case. Something I've seen a couple of times now around this particular mess is the concept of software being "done". I.e. it works, it's feature complete enough for 90%+ of people […]

@pfish.zone so much of the maintainer community right now is handwringing about "but if we ban LLM use, how will we tell?" and I am exasperated because the answer is not some sophisticated word-probability detection machine, it is "they will be blindingly obvious about it, and if they manage to […]

Alright I've had two Actually Sunny days on my three (count 'em) old cheap secondhand solar panels that I raccooned off facebook marketplace and this coincided with hearing politicians argue about solar on the radio so I now have a Political Opinion About Solar Panels It is this Solar panels […]

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room. Tridge […]

Practice makes perfect. AI makes slop. Regular AI use measurably weakens skills. People stop practicing. Researchers published findings showing that higher AI reliance correlated with lower critical thinking scores, independent of age, education, or […] [Original post on mastodon.world]

Cursed homelab update: Still trying to calm down the fans on Server #3, I decided to upgrade Kubernetes from 1.31 to 1.34 (well I wanted to upgrade beyond that, but ... you'll see...) Kubernetes upgrades with Kubeadm are delightfully straightforward: upgrade the stuff managed by Kubeadm, then […]

This whole rust-lang AI policy debate ethics ban thing is making me a little annoyed for two reasons: 1. While limiting debate like this is a pretty bad look, this is because as far as they're concerned the ethics issue is already addressed to their satisfaction and requires no further debate. 2 […]

in the darkest hour of man saddle the steed of apocalypse and ride with angels of hell #unix_surrealism #comic #tarot #occult #computers #art #fediart #triapul

Everyone deserves to feel the joy of a brand new Trackpoint. So I replaced the broken adapter on my T480's nub with a new 3D printed replacement. I tried two designs: one that was Just The Measurements and one with a little more flare. I lost track […] [Original post on social.treehouse.systems]

Are you normal, or do you have both generations of Steam Controller hooked up to your Steam Deck? #SteamDeck #steamcontroller

Hey so to be clear, talking about your openclaw agent as if it is a real person with feelings that is capable of hurting YOUR feelings is deranged. It isn't cute. That's concerning.

Cursed homelab mini-update: The 80GB server, or how I upgraded both our laptops. One of the outcomes of the Qotomihilation is that I ended up with two perfectly nice SODIMMs of 32GB DDR4 RAM from Crucial. So I did what any enterprising techie in the rampocalypse would do: buy converters so I […]

Cursed Homelab mini-update: Unbreaking Kubernetes. Once again I've realised that my Kubernetes cluster is broken and unbroken it. This time the symptom was "exec" style health checks not working. It turns out that cgroups v1 and cgroups v2 are both different, and need to be configured in not […]

As someone who is over on team containers, if all this fun stuff is possible, why aren't we doing this for containers? People escaping containers is practically a meme and there's a bunch of solutions to spin up mini-VMs to contain them for more security. And if we already are, why is nobody […]

Y'know, it's very difficult to get into a server's management interface when it gets it's IP from DHCP and the DHCP server runs on the same server. #homelab #cursedhomelab

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 8 Living with it. It's loud. It's unacceptably loud. Even after sorting out the 100% fans issue, it's still too loud with the fans at just over 30%. Last night I slept barely ok and woke up in the middle of the night. I don't know for certain if this was […]

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 7 of 7 The bootination! So server is on the shelf, I'm rushing to put server #2 on top of it, hook up all the cables, put the QNAP box on top of that, and hook it all up before Linux finishes booting and Ceph starts expecting the drives to be there. Except […]

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 6 The adapterening! So as discussed in a previous nanoupdate, the adapters I bought have a bunch of issues, but ultimately only two matter for me right now: 1. They're not physically compatible with 2.5" drive […] [Original post on social.treehouse.systems]

OH "What unifies software engineers? We are *terrible* at writing programs"

Having 96 threads is a bit of a mindfuck: * Load spike of 30+? Barely even worth mentioning * CPU usage at 1500%? Fans spin up for a couple of seconds I'm used to running 8 threads at or just above the sensible limits. What even is this? it's like spending your life in a courtyard then being […]

Cursed homelab nanoupdate: HPE DL380 Gen10s seem to be utterly _paranoid_ about non-HP PCIe devices: On bed, NVMe SSDs installed, doing nothing: nearly silent. On shelf, NVMe SSDs installed + PCIe AHCI adapter: ramped up to 100% and nearly deafening Turns out that if you tell it to use […]

IIUC "vibe coding" is letting a text prediction algorithm trained on the full range of coding practices from the rare good to the predominantly average/awful loose & thinking it'll do well. It's like people never learned from Babbage: "On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of […]

i wrote an internet standard https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow-mrrp-00.html (it's published on ietf so you know it's real and official and endorsed by the ietf)

the statements "LLMs are only good for producing tedious and borderline-worthless bullshit" and "LLMs can produce code of vaguely equivalent quality to the current software industry median" are not necessarily mutually exclusive

If all you do in your tech career is: 1. When something is slow, you look carefully at the output of a profiler or a query plan & make measured suggestions about what to improve; 2. When something breaks badly, you gently but insistently ask what & why until you truly know, then the next time […]

Cursed homelab nanoupdate: It turns out that the crappy cheap NVMe adapters work perfectly if you short the presence pin to ground. They even light up the activity LED in the caddy if you connect the NVMe activity LED to the activity pin. #cursedhomelab #homelab

Ok, now I have to write up something about this: https://s3kshun8.games/blog/flatpak-won/ Yeah. Well. Ok. Let's talk about Bazzite - by which I mean Universal Blue and the bunch of related Fedora SilverBlue derived distros. (Disclaimer: I believe there have been AI-related developments in and […]

Me: I'm running out of space in my Google account, I know, I'll write a tool to use the Google Photos API to download and delete old photos Google: No you won't, all API access for plebs like you is either viewing user-chosen photos or managing app-uploaded photos. No backups, organisation or […]

tbh i just don't really feel like "babysitting a team of perpetual newbies that charge by the word" is productive in any sense of the word, when we can just do the work directly ourselves

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 4 Whoops I got these out of order. Let's talk HDD caddies or trays. HPE's Gen10 servers have caddies which are the exact intersection of "price optimised" and "crazy enterprise nonsense". My experience is […] [Original post on social.treehouse.systems]

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 5 Everything is wrong and it's all broken. * I can't get an M.2 NVMe drive to even appear on the bus with the adapters I've purchased. No errors, no warnings, not even a hint that the drive even could be there. iLO says nothing, BIOS says nothing, I've […]

Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM. Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting […]

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 3 Nearly go-live day with the new server. Last Thursday, I was supposed to receive two NVMe caddies and 2 M.2 to U.2 adapters (that's SFF-8639 if you're into SFF numbers) Predictably only the caddies showed up, it's now Tuesday and the adapters just got […]

if you're using AI regularly to generate text/presentations that you intend to use persuasively i don't think i can trust a single thing you say. Where does the AI end and the human begin? I think this is why im so against AI generated commit messages especially if the code was written by a […]

average tech thread

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 2 I've poked around and done my research and options are not good. iLO is too new to hack, so that option is out. Running it with a fresh Debian install, agent software and _no_ load produces minimal fan noise, but there's a persistent high-pitched whining […]

**Subject:** [Action Required] Important AWS Account Notice > As previously communicated on 2025-09-30 in an email we sent at 23:45 UTC while you were on annual leave, AWS will be sunsetting all Amazon ElasticJizzWailer (EJW) nodes, starting yesterday. Please migrate your workloads to Amazon […]

Cursed Homelab Server Upgrade - Part 1 The big problem with this server that has no obvious solution is fan noise. The server has 6x 60mm thick server-class fans and when they're running full speed they are loud. A friend at school joked that his computer had so many fans it'd hover. This […]

Cursed Homelab Update So I have what is technically my first piece of actual server-grade hardware. A very clean, refurbished HP DL380 Gen 10 with 48 cores of Xeon Scalable v2 goodness, nowhere near enough RAM (thanks AI - 64GB of DDR4 was about half the price of the server) 10 Ethernet ports […]

1. YES THEY ARE. They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say […]

AWS serverless: for when you want to pay far too much for two containers and an S3 bucket in a trenchcoat. #tech #aws #Cloud

hearing gullible 20-somethings say "this technology DOES have good use-cases, like in medicine for example…" is going to turn me into the fucking Joker

You all should read this fantastic post by @onepict about how, largely, AI people just can't leave us the fuck alone. But I'm noticing more and more and more that they get super mad when they wanna shove their #ai creation at you and you simply say, no thanks. That's it. No extra bashing, just […]

I wrote about the #fediverse https://matduggan.com/boy-i-was-wrong-about-the-fediverse/

Dear computer manufacturers. If your product overheats, it should be after any fans in it have been running at full speed for a while. Or to put it another way, there should be a temperature that if the device reaches it, the fans run at full speed, and that temperature should be below any […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116172179294783146 "Is there a point to understanding things?" is, I think, the single biggest open question about Software Engineering as a discipline that has opened up over the last 18 months. I expect it'll be answered in the affirmative, but a) I don't […]

My work computer is a Core Ultra 1xx Intel CPU in an Asus NUC 14 and it keeps overheating. What really gets me though is that despite me setting the fan setting to "Cool" or whatever the maximum fan setting is, it doesn't actually spin up the fan before it shuts itself off. So I'm sitting […]

I don't have anything to say online because "war is the worst horror we've ever come up with and starting one should be disqualifying from public life as well as office" is not really a catchy take.

Just played the Train Misconductor demo by @whirligig-girl.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy and it's exactly what I was expecting: fun but complicated train shunting puzzles in a alien-but-not-too-much setting. Also steam trains! And it works flawlessly on a SteamDeck (with some control remapping) […]

I've been wanting to write something lengthy about "AI" for a while, discussing the arguments for and against and arriving at a reasonable position, but I find myself completely unable to get past the most glaring point, which is that we are facing _catastrophic ecosphere collapse_ because of […]