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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I was traveling internationally recently and returning to the USA I didn’t even need my passport to clear through immigration. They had a camera which recognized me and gave me the green light to pass as I approached.

    The agent had a few questions and I was on my way.

    It was convenient as hell, but the fact that their system can link me to whatever data is stored with my passport records based on a second or two of recognition out of all the faces that must be in there…

    actually kinda blows.

    It means they can definitely put a street camera system in place and see oh, there’s /u/nucleative. Wonder why he’s at the protest, bank, with that person, driving that car, near a crime scene, or anything else.

    Somehow we have zero privacy yet the enforcement hides behind numbers and masks.

    I expect that this will just continue to go further and further.

    Kids, this is why we needed to push back hard on privacy, random cameras, and facial recognition 20 years ago.

    The metaphorical horse is already out of the barn and removing or disabling these systems will probably never happen now.








  • I remember that IBM was famously missing the trend in the late 80s/90s and couldn’t understand why regular consumers would ever want to buy a PC. It’s why they gave the PC clone market away, never seriously approached their OS/2 thing, and never really marketed directly to anybody except businesses.

    Microsoft really pushed the idea that regular people needed a home PC which laid the foundation for so many people already having the hardware in place to jump on the internet as soon as it became accessible.

    For a brief moment it looked like a toss up between Microsoft IIS webservers serving up .asp files (or coldfusion .cf - RIP) vs Apache pushing CGI but in the end the Linux solution was more baked and flexible when it was time to launch and scale an internet startup in that era.

    Somebody else would have done what Microsoft did for sure, had they not been there, and I suppose we could be paying AT&T for Unix licenses these days too. But yeah, ultimately both Gates and Torvalds were right in terms of operating systems and well timed.


  • Both Torvalds and Gates are nerds… Gates decided to monetize it and Torvalds decided to give it away.

    But without Microsoft’s “PC on every desktop” vision for the '90s, we may not have seen such an increased demand for server infrastructure which is all running the Linux kernel now.

    Arguably Torvalds’ strategy had a greater impact than Gates because now many of us carry his kernel in our pocket. But I think both needed each other to get where we are today.











  • Having electric stability issues this week in Bangkok - several 2-3 hour outages, which are too long for a UPS to cover the gap. I have several mid range but older PCs running docker, virtualbox, etc for various things including a postfix server for the family email, immich, QBittorrent, pihole, paperless, huly, postiz, a Minecraft bedrock server, a flightradar24 ads-b collector, and a variety of other homegrown projects.

    Thinking about getting some or most of this over to a service like hetzner, perhaps even splurging on a baremetal dedicated system.

    Recently I’ve been reading about/trying to learn qemu and proxmox, but don’t understand them yet. Is that where it’s at for managing a bunch of your own VMs? Or kubernetes/k8s?

    I’ve been a little out of the loop for a few years and of course coming back up to speed IT wise judge take weeks. Looking for recommendations on offloading my home stuff to a cloud that I control.