I’ve always recommended the Linux Upskill Challenge. It takes you step by step from the cli to scripting, incrementally. It’s also a good bookmark to reference in the future.

The way you think “we will pay wether we like or not so we better make it count and take the biggest debt we can”

There was a tinge of snark in my comment. Sorry it didn’t follow through. In the end, we are but a minute speck, but our over exaggerated sense of self importance hinders us.

Despite all our rage, we’re still just rats in a cage.

The internet didn’t solve this, far from it.

The internet didn’t cause it either. Poverty and poverty of the mind has existed for millennia. It is sad to me that we do not help those in need more than we do. I feel we have a moral obligation to help our fellow man when he is in need, no matter who they are or how they came to be in need.

it’s not gonna be good in a thousand years…

I truly believe that given enough time an technology, man can achieve pretty nigh anything. We’ve witnessed this since the dawn of time. It will take a global effort tho, because we are all inexorably tied together on this planet. No man, no country is an island. An example of this was when we banned the use of Chlorofluorocarbons because we were eating a hole in our ozone and ionosphere. That was a global effort, and it worked. We just need to move past our short shortsightedness and greed. That’s always been the stumbling block.

I don’t have all the answers my friend. I do have a lot of unanswered questions. It’s just one old man’s opinion who’s seen a lot of shit and lived a full and rather colorful life. One opinion in a vast ocean of opinions.

AI was already doing good before ChatGPT and LLMs like folding proteins which shaped human history.

Absolutely. AI is not really a new phenom. ChatGPT and LLMS are.

Member the ML days before tech bros called it AI?

I certainly do too.

Ford didn’t create greed. Computers and the internet didn’t create hucksters, neither did it create gullible people blown around by the wind without a compass or direction. Fools and their money have been parted for millennia.

no effort seems to have been made to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place

I would somewhat disagree with you in that no effort has been made to keep people from being sick. That’s a pretty bold statement. However, a large portion of the medical industry (which, yes is subject to greed) is not really about the curative and more about the maintenance. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You can instruct people on healthy living which will extend their life and the quality thereof, but you cannot force them to do so. That is, and has been a huge issue. People line up at the hospital in large instances because they did not even attempt to lead a healthy lifestyle. They are an encumbrance in a way, because those who do live healthy lifestyles are penalized for those who don’t.

Without being overly dramatic, I can confidently say, that if it weren’t for medical advances, I would probably not be typing these words. I did everything I could to live a healthy lifestyle, but suffered a TBI in a fall from 2 stories up. I have a medical polymer implant in my right frontal lobe due to cranial damage. They scanned the hole in my skull, and 3D printed a replacement. Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle. I’m 71 now. That’s pretty damn awesome in my book.

(Oh lawd, hide the credit cards).

LOL!

LLMs and generative AI don’t make money.

I would agree with you. At this juncture AI a loss leader, much like putting a man on the moon was a loss leader. How’s that technology benefiting you now? Significantly. I’m in no way glossing over the issues with AI. It has real world problems, and needs intervention, serious intervention.

Since we are in a technology forum, a few quotes:

LinuxFoundation

“Frontier AI models have given defenders the ability to find and fix vulnerabilities in open source software at a speed and scale that were never possible before. That’s an enormous opportunity for defenders, and Akrites ensures we seize it together. Maintainers deserve a coordinated partnership, not a flood of reports. AWS is committed to securing the projects our customers depend on and building this shared infrastructure alongside the community.”

– Matt Wilson, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Amazon Web Services

“Open source projects collectively underpin much of the internet, and the existing model for coordinated disclosure has been outpaced by how quickly AI can now find vulnerabilities. Getting ahead of that requires the industry to coordinate on findings and get fixes upstream before they’re disclosed and exploited. Efforts like Akrites drive this level of coordination at the scale and speed this moment requires.”

– Jason Clinton, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, Anthropic

“The software supply chain is only as strong as the upstream it draws from, and we see how thin that layer really is. As AI finds more vulnerabilities, the industry will rush to patch them. Without coordination, those fixes will fragment across different patches and forks, and maintainers who are already overwhelmed, unreachable, or haven’t touched a project in years. Akrites gives the industry one coordinated way to fix vulnerabilities upstream before they’re exploited, with maintainers still in control. Now the work is making sure there’s always someone on the other end to catch them.”

Sooner or later we are going to pay for it. Again. All of us.

Yes, we will pay for crawling out from the primordial ooze billions of years ago. Everything is finite.

I can think of hundreds of innovations and good. Take just the medical field. Huge advances in attending the sick, the diseased. Yes, all technology wields a double edged sword. When the first Ford rolled off the assembly line it was a huge boon to travel, tourism, commerce. What were the downsides? Well, it’s noisy, pollutive, the processes to extract it’s fuel is very volatile. Yet, you get in your car and go to the grocery store, work, or even vacation without thinking about such things for the most part. The efficiency, the decrease in pollution, emissions, etc. are somewhat a thing off the past. Yes, there are massive improvements we can make, especially in renewable resources and electric vehicles.

Those who pine for ‘the good ol’ days’, usually do so with thick rose colored glasses.

No, no…sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that I need a robotic lawnmower. Well, it’d be super cool, but it would have to be scaled considerably and hooked up to GPS. More so that I am at times envious because it takes me a good week+ to groom it all. The livestock tend their own plots, and the manure goes in a compost bin and then to my personal gardens.

All things must pass. All things must pass away. ~ George Harrison

I look back over the years when I first discovered there was a thing labeled a computer as a yongster. I remember the curmudgeons, scoffers, and nay sayers talking about how this ‘fad’ called ‘the computer’ and subsequently ‘the internet’ was all just a waste of time, and that all of us nerds and geeks would soon see the stark error of our ways. I even had an employer tell me, ‘Buy something off the internet? <scoff> No one will ever buy anything off the internet!’ and then he launched into a ‘Why, back in my day we …yadda yadda yadda’ diatribe.

I look back and wonder how far along we’d be in solar power infrastructures had a lowly peanut farmer not been religiously and hatefully ridiculed for installing solar panels in the White House. Sure, they were inefficient but it was the concept, the idea, that yes this can work with some further tooling and technology. I look back even further in history and pick out Fulton’s Folly and how he was lambasted for his stupidity, thinking he could put a steam engine on a boat and make it a viable form of transportation. It became a huge boon to commerce and travel up and down the Mississippi, and subsequently spread to other areas. I think about our early steps into space travel and how there were massive amounts of vocal opponents to this waste of energy and tax dollars. Yet, even to this day, we still reap the rewards of that technology in our every day lives. So much so, that we never stop to think about it.

I’m not here to say that AI in any of it’s many forms is the golden goose or the egg. It is fraught with problems, some of which are glaring, and it needs some heavy governmental regulation. I, like many others, have concerns about AI coded projects and the safety and security thereof. However, this knee jerk reaction to anything AI reminds me of so much of history, in that, the once disdained has now become so common place, as to be taken for granted.

Sometimes, I envy you guys with your smaller lawns. I’ve got about 4 acres of ‘lawn’ which is partially taken up with a large set of raised vegetable gardens, goat and chicken pens, A couple acres to raise a few head of cattle on, then scrub brush and woods, and then 15 acres of farmland.

Xeriscaping. Lawns started as a form of opulence and stature of the rich. It signaled wealth as they were rich enough to afford to have a lawn, pay for it’s grooming and labor, and not use it to grow food, along with paintings of oversized livestock. Let the chips mellow for a while before planting the garden as rotting vegetation puts out a crazy amount of heat and will scorch tender sprouts. If you’ve ever stuck your hands in a compost bin, it’s quite toasty.

That’s pretty interesting. I remember when ‘robotic mowers’ became a buzz word way back when. They just never seemed to really take off on a mass consumer level or maybe I just haven’t noticed. Now something like a DeepKron would interest me.

I might just deal with the heat and get a push mower

You’re a better man than I Gunga Din. I got up at 5:00 AM the other day and cut grass. I’ve got a lot of lawn, so I’ve got a 54" Toro ZTR and a bush hog for the tractor. It’s 109 F in the shade, and the ‘feels like’ temp is probably hotter than Beelzebub’s ball sack. There’s be no way I’d push it.

To me, the question is ‘How much do you secure a home server that’s only accessible with VPN?’ to which I would answer, secure everything, every last jot and tilde. Especially in a homelab environment where a nefarious actor could gain lateral movement. The data on my server, tho important to me, is not the prime concern as much as becoming a zombie in someone’s botnet. The very first Linux server I stood up got hacked overnight. Since then, I’m keen to lock everything down. I’ve been told I go overboard, but I’d rather that scenario.

You bet. So far, it’s an enjoyable read.

My point is that I think Cloudflare is ok with personal use, but if you are heavily hammering them on the daily, it would probably be an issue. It hasn’t been an issue to date, and I’ve been running with Cloudflare for quite a while. You do bring up some good points/concerns, and it’s something every user should consider before hitching their wagon to Cloudflare. It is a free tier after all, but not unlimited.

Jellyfin/Plex? Walking the line on getting banned.

I don’t run JF or any parts of the *arr stack, so legal/shady video content isn’t a concern. I do stream my private/physical audio collection via Navidrome I’ve been amassing for decades all converted out to flac. I mean, from Cloudflare’s standpoint, I think it’s reasonable and understandable.

Very nice site set up man. Looks like a lot of good info and a lot of work involved. I too use Authelia as an added security step. I have your site bookmarked and will peruse it’s contents in a bit. Thanks for sharing.